Architecture¶

OpenERP as a multitenant three-tiers architecture¶

This section presents the OpenERP architecture along with technology details of the application. The tiers composing OpenERP are presented. Communication means and protocols between the application components are also presented. Some details about used development languages and technology stack are then summarized.

OpenERP is a multitenant, three-tiers architecture: database tier for data storage, application tier for processing and functionalities and presentation tier providing user interface. Those are separate layers inside OpenERP. The application tier itself is written as a core; multiple additional modules can be installed in order to create a particular instance of OpenERP adapted to specific needs and requirements. Moreover, OpenERP follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern.

A typical deployment of OpenERP is shown on Figure 1. This deployment is called Web embedded deployment. As shown, an OpenERP system consists of three main components:

a PostgreSQL database server which contains all OpenERP databases. Databases contain all application data, and also most of the OpenERP system configuration elements. Note that this server can possibly be deployed using clustered databases.
the OpenERP Server, which contains all the enterprise logic and ensures that OpenERP runs optimally. One layer of the server is dedicated to communicate and interface with the PostgreSQL database, the ORM engine. Another layer allows communications between the server and a web browser, the Web layer. Having more than one server is possible, for example in conjunction with a load balancing mechanism.
the client running in the a web browser as javascript application.

The database server and the OpenERP server can be installed on the same computer, or distributed onto separate computer servers, for example for performance considerations.

OpenERP 6.1 architecture for embedded web deployment

The next subsections give details about the different tiers of the OpenERP architecture.

PostgreSQL database¶

The data tier of OpenERP is provided by a PostgreSQL relational database. While direct SQL queries can be executed from OpenERP modules, most accesses to the relational database are done through the server Object Relational Mapping layer.

Databases contain all application data, and also most of the OpenERP system configuration elements. Note that this server can possibly be deployed using clustered databases.

OpenERP server¶

OpenERP provides an application server on which specific business applications can be built. It is also a complete development framework, offering a range of features to write those applications. Among those features, the OpenERP ORM provides functionalities and an interface on top of the PostgreSQL server. The OpenERP server also features a specific layer designed to communicate with the web browser-based client. This layer connects users using standard browsers to the server.

From a developer perspective, the server acts both as a library which brings the above benefits while hiding the low-level details, and as a simple way to install, configure and run the written applications. The server also contains other services, such as extensible data models and view, workflow engine or reports engine. However, those are OpenERP services not specifically related to security, and are therefore not discussed in details in this document.

Server - ORM

The Object Relational Mapping ORM layer is one of the salient features of the OpenERP Server. It provides additional and essential functionalities on top of PostgreSQL server. Data models are described in Python and OpenERP creates the underlying database tables using this ORM. All the benefits of RDBMS such as unique constraints, relational integrity or efficient querying are used and completed by Python flexibility. For instance, arbitrary constraints written in Python can be added to any model. Different modular extensibility mechanisms are also afforded by OpenERP.

It is important to understand the ORM responsibility before attempting to by-pass it and to access directly the underlying database via raw SQL queries. When using the ORM, OpenERP can make sure the data remains free of any corruption. For instance, a module can react to data creation in a particular table. This behavior can occur only if queries go through the ORM.

The services granted by the ORM are among other :

consistency validation by powerful validity checks,

providing an interface on objects (methods, references, ...) allowing to design and implement efficient modules,

row-level security per user and group; more details about users and user groups are given in the section Users and User Roles,

complex actions on a group of resources,

inheritance service allowing fine modeling of new resources

Server - Web

The web layer offers an interface to communicate with standard browsers. In the 6.1 version of OpenERP, the web-client has been rewritten and integrated into the OpenERP server tier. This web layer is a WSGI-compatible application based on werkzeug. It handles regular http queries to server static file or dynamic content and JSON-RPC queries for the RPC made from the browser.

Modules

By itself, the OpenERP server is a core. For any enterprise, the value of OpenERP lies in its different modules. The role of the modules is to implement any business requirement. The server is the only necessary component to add modules. Any official OpenERP release includes a lot of modules, and hundreds of modules are available thanks to the community. Examples of such modules are Account, CRM, HR, Marketing, MRP, Sale, etc.

Clients¶

As the application logic is mainly contained server-side, the client is conceptually simple. It issues a request to the server, gets data back and display the result (e.g. a list of customers) in different ways (as forms, lists, calendars, ...). Upon user actions, it sends queries to modify data to the server.

The default client of OpenERP is an JavaScript application running in the browser that communicates with the server using JSON-RPC.

MVC architecture in OpenERP¶

According to Wikipedia, “a Model-view-controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern used in software engineering”. In complex computer applications presenting lots of data to the user, one often wishes to separate data (model) and user interface (view) concerns. Changes to the user interface does therefore not impact data management, and data can be reorganized without changing the user interface. The model-view-controller solves this problem by decoupling data access and business logic from data presentation and user interaction, by introducing an intermediate component: the controller.

Model-View-Controller diagram

For example in the diagram above, the solid lines for the arrows starting from the controller and going to both the view and the model mean that the controller has a complete access to both the view and the model. The dashed line for the arrow going from the view to the controller means that the view has a limited access to the controller. The reasons of this design are :

From View to Model : the model sends notification to the view when its data has been modified in order the view to redraw its content. The model doesn’t need to know the inner workings of the view to perform this operation. However, the view needs to access the internal parts of the model.

From View to Controller : the reason why the view has limited access to the controller is because the dependencies from the view to the controller need to be minimal: the controller can be replaced at any moment.

OpenERP follows the MVC semantic with

model : The PostgreSQL tables.

view : views are defined in XML files in OpenERP.

controller : The objects of OpenERP.

Network communications and WSGI¶

OpenERP is an HTTP web server and may also be deployed as an WSGI-compliant application.

Clients may communicate with OpenERP using sessionless XML-RPC, the recommended way to interoperate with OpenERP. Web-based clients communicates using the session aware JSON-RPC.

Everything in OpenERP, and objects methods in particular, are exposed via the network and a security layer. Access to the data model is in fact a ‘service’ and it is possible to expose new services. For instance, a WebDAV service and a FTP service are available.

Services can make use of the WSGI stack. WSGI is a standard solution in the Python ecosystem to write HTTP servers, applications, and middleware which can be used in a mix-and-match fashion. By using WSGI, it is possible to run OpenERP in any WSGI compliant server. It is also possible to use OpenERP to host a WSGI application.

A striking example of this possibility is the OpenERP Web layer that is the server-side counter part to the web clients. It provides the requested data to the browser and manages web sessions. It is a WSGI-compliant application. As such, it can be run as a stand-alone HTTP server or embedded inside OpenERP.

The HTTP namespaces /openerp/ /object/ /common/ are reserved for the XML-RPC layer, every module restrict it’s HTTP namespace to /<name_of_the_module>/

Process model¶

In the past, the OpenERP server was using threads to handle HTTP requests concurrently or to process cron jobs. Using threads is still the default behavior when running the openerp-server script but not the recommended one: it is in fact recommended to use the --workers option.

By using the --workers option, the OpenERP server will spawn a fixed number of processes instead of spawning a new thread for each incoming request.

This has a number of advantages:

Processes do not suffer from CPython’s Global Interpreter Lock.

Processes can be gracefully recycled while requests are still handled by the server.

Resources such as CPU time and memory made available to a process can be monitored on a per-process basis.

When using the --workers options, two types of processes may be spawned: web process, and cron process.

New in version 7.1.

When using the --workers options, three types of processes may be spawned: web process, and cron process, just as previsouly, but also an evented (using gevent) web process is started. It is used for long-polling as needed by the upcoming Instant Messaging feature. As for now, that process is listening on a different port than the main web processes. A reverse proxy (e.g. Nginx) to listen on a unique port, mapping all requests to the normal port, but mapping the /longpolling route to the evented process is necessary (the web interface cannot issue requests to different ports).

(It is possible to make the threaded server evented by passing the --gevent flag.)

The goal is to drop support for the threaded model, and also make all web processes evented; there would be no more distinction between “normal” and “longpolling” processes. For this to happen, further testing is needed.