Nextjs Odoo: A Comprehensive Guide to Headless Commerce

Headless commerce is a revolutionary approach to e-commerce that allows businesses to separate the presentation layer from the backend infrastructure.

This separation enables businesses to use different technologies for the frontend and backend, making it easier to develop and maintain their online stores.

With Nextjs Odoo, businesses can create a seamless shopping experience for their customers, regardless of the device or platform they use.

Nextjs Odoo is a powerful combination of Nextjs and Odoo, two popular technologies that are widely used in the e-commerce industry.

By leveraging the strengths of both technologies, businesses can create a headless commerce solution that is fast, scalable, and secure.

Headless commerce is a game-changer for online stores. It allows for flexibility and independence in making changes to the front-end and back-end layers.

Odoo acts as the powerful back-end, managing product information, inventory, customer data, and other crucial aspects of your online store. This is a significant advantage over traditional e-commerce setups.

Next.js serves as the front-end layer, providing a visually appealing and user-friendly online store with features like server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG) for lightning-fast performance and SEO benefits.

The key to headless commerce is the communication between the front-end and back-end layers. This is achieved through Odoo's GraphQL API, which establishes a smooth flow of data between the two layers.

Here are the benefits of using a GraphQL API in headless commerce:

With headless commerce, you can create a custom front-end that meets your specific needs, without being limited by the back-end. This is a major advantage over traditional e-commerce setups.

Choosing an API is a crucial step in building a Next.js Odoo application. Odoo already has community modules that implement the base RESTful API or GraphQL.

This allows your front-end development team to work as they're used to without having to understand the inner workings of the Odoo back-end.

To configure an API endpoint, you need to create a new file called route.tsx inside the app/api/create-lead directory. This file will hold the code that sends form data to Odoo CRM.

The URL for the API endpoint is ${process.env.ODOO_API_URL}/api/create-lead, which requires an environment variable ODOO_API_URL in the .env file. This variable holds the value of the URL of your Odoo instance.

In the .env file, you'll need to add the ODOO_API_URL variable and assign it the correct value. This will allow your API endpoint to connect to your Odoo instance correctly.

Odoo offers two API options: REST and GraphQL. You can choose the one that suits your needs.

Odoo has community modules that implement the base RESTful API or GraphQL, allowing your front-end development team to work as they're used to without having to understand the inner workings of the Odoo back-end.

You can use your preferred front-end JavaScript libraries and let Odoo run your back-end, implementing your business rules effortlessly.

You'll need to run Next.js using npm run dev or yarn dev to test the integration.

Start the Odoo instance and install the custom addon that holds your LeadController. This is crucial for the integration to work.

From your browser, open the URL http://0.0.0.0:3000/contact and fill in the details of the contact form.

In Odoo, creating a controller to create a CRM Lead is a necessary step for integration with Next.js. Odoo doesn't provide a default API to create leads, so we need to create a custom API route.

To do this, we'll need to create a controller in our custom Odoo module. This is because Odoo controllers are responsible for handling API requests and interacting with the database.

Creating a controller involves defining the API route and the logic to handle the request. In our case, we'll be creating a route to accept requests from the Next.js contact form.

We'll assume you already know how to create an Odoo controller from a custom Odoo module, as mentioned in the previous step. If not, you'll need to follow the standard process for creating a controller in Odoo.

Testing Website Integration is a crucial step in ensuring a seamless connection between your website and CRM system.

To test the integration, you'll need to run the Next.js website using npm run dev or yarn dev.

Start the Odoo instance and make sure the custom addon with the LeadController is installed.

Open the URL http://0.0.0.0:3000/contact in your browser.

Fill in the details of the contact form and hit submit.

The form should create a crm.lead record in the Odoo CRM.

You can validate the record in the Odoo CRM pipeline.