I'm trying to implement a module in OpenERP to integrate with a separate service. This means that rather than using the PostgreSQL database, I want any requests for these models to be implemented as API calls.

I would like to make use of the web client's features, so tree and form views, and ideally also keep relations between various models intact, while having them backed by a separate service.

So if the client asks for a list of these models, this should result in an API call to the external service asking for a list, and returning a response.

So far, the only way I've been able to think of is to inherit a TransientModel and overriding all the search(), read() etc calls, but this seems like a suboptimal solution, because I also have to translate things like operators into a limited API.

Am I looking at this wrongly? Is there something I missed?