12:20 - 12:50 - Seamlessly Linking External Folders to Odoo Records with fsspec: A Generic, Extensible Approach
Location: Mosane Rooms n° 5+6 - 9/16/25, 12:20 PM - 9/16/25, 12:50 PM (+0200) (30 minutes)
12:20 - 12:50 - Seamlessly Linking External Folders to Odoo Records with fsspec: A Generic, Extensible Approach
Laurent Mignon http://www.acsone.eu laurent.mignon@acsone.eu +32478403126

I’m a senior technical lead at ACSONE with over 20 years of experience as a software engineer. I’ve been an active member of the OCA since its creation and have contributed to several strategic initiatives, including the Shopinvader project.

My work focuses on large-scale projects, where I’ve developed strong expertise in system integration and business process optimization. I’ve also been deeply involved in integrating Odoo with external systems using open standards and modern architectures. This includes designing modules to expose and consume APIs for seamless interoperability with third-party systems, optimizing file and attachment handling in cloud-based and redundant environments, and integrating Odoo with enterprise document management platforms such as Alfresco and, more recently, SharePoint — all while relying on widely adopted Python libraries that represent the state of the art in their domains, such as fsspec for filesystem abstraction or FastAPI for modern API design.

In that context, I’m the author of low-level modules (base_rest, fastapi, fs_attachment, alfodoo, ...) that give developers powerful building blocks to manage documents and automate workflows in a scalable and vendor-neutral way.

In this talk, I will present a new Odoo module that introduces a powerful new type of field designed to link an Odoo record to a folder located in an external filesystem — whether on a local Unix path, S3 bucket, SFTP server, or even Microsoft SharePoint.

Beyond a simple technical feature, this module includes a dedicated UI widget that allows users to manage the folder's content directly from the record's form view — providing a seamless user experience fully integrated into Odoo.

The backend implementation is based on the Python fsspec library, which provides a unified and extensible API for interacting with a wide variety of filesystems. This design enables developers to provide a generic solution, while also supporting customer-specific needs or advanced filesystem features through customizable adapters.

I will also explain why this solution avoids relying on Odoo attachments and synchronization mechanisms, opting instead for a clean reference model that reduces complexity and avoids common pitfalls in document management integrations.

Finally, I’ll share how this approach was extended to support real-world use cases, such as integration with Microsoft SharePoint document libraries — all while remaining modular and reusable for other customer contexts.

Target Audience:

Odoo developers, functional consultants, and technical architects looking to integrate document or folder structures with Odoo in a robust, scalable, and vendor-neutral way.

Key Takeaways:

* How to define and use an Odoo field to link external folders to records.

* How to build an extensible UI widget to browse and manage folder contents.

* How fsspec enables a uniform and pluggable filesystem abstraction.

* How this approach integrates with the addons allowing to store your attachments into an external filsystem to store generated rapport as part of the folder linked to the odoo’s record

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