I am wanting to create a method that will export a subset of product.product records to a CSV. My end goal is to get a csv to drop somewhere with those filtered product.product records. Then I'm going to use a scheduled action with the product.product object and my custom method to export this on a daily basis.

Any suggestions would be great. I feel like I just need to iterate over the records in the product.product model, and then pass each one to csv.writer. I'm a little new to python and not 100% on going over the individual members of that object. 

Edit:

The Help Docs (Which are much better with 8.0) just cleared up for me that:

Methods defined on a model are executed on a recordset, and their self is a recordset:

class AModel(models.Model): _name = 'a.model' def a_method(self): # self can be anywhere between 0 records and all records in the # database self.do_operation()

So, I think I'm looking for something like this:

import csv

from openerp.osv import fields, osv

class product_product(osv.Model):

    _inherit = 'product.product'
    
    def _export_products_to_csv(self, fields, rows):
        fp = StringIO()
        writer = csv.writer(fp, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
        writer.writerow([name.encode('utf-8') for name in fields])
        
        for row in rows:
            writer.writerow(row)
        fp.close()

Per my comment below (which trashed the formatting for the code), here is the code I find in addons\web\controllers\main.py which appears to be the controller for creating the csv file. It looks like open just uses the csv writer from python's built in library:

class CSVExport(ExportFormat, http.Controller):

    @http.route('/web/export/csv', type='http', auth="user")
    @serialize_exception
    def index(self, data, token):
        return self.base(data, token)

    @property
    def content_type(self):
        return 'text/csv;charset=utf8'

    def filename(self, base):
        return base + '.csv'

    def from_data(self, fields, rows):
        fp = StringIO()
        writer = csv.writer(fp, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)

        writer.writerow([name.encode('utf-8') for name in fields])

        for data in rows:
            row = []
            for d in data:
                if isinstance(d, basestring):
                    d = d.replace('\n',' ').replace('\t',' ')
                    try:
                        d = d.encode('utf-8')
                    except UnicodeError:
                        pass
                if d is False: d = None
                row.append(d)
            writer.writerow(row)

        fp.seek(0)
        data = fp.read()
        fp.close()
        return data

I'll drop my solution on GitHub once I get this figured out.