Power BI — OData Feed with Your Odoo Access Rights

What you pay for, and what exists for free

Free OData connectors exist, and they do serve data. This module costs €69 for three things none of them does:

• a log of what was served — rows, rejections, duration, account applied, columns dropped; without it, a report showing wrong figures cannot be troubleshot;

• a wrong token returns 404, not 403 — you do not confirm to someone trying random URLs that they have found a valid one;

• a readable column next to each link — without it, every relationship has to be rebuilt by hand in Power BI before the first chart.

If you can do without these three things, a free connector will do.

The format Power BI expects

Power BI Desktop ships with a standard OData Feed connector. This module exposes an OData v4 feed: paste a URL, choose “Anonymous”, and the tables appear. Nothing to install on Windows, no custom connector to get approved, no Azure app registration.

Excel reads the same feed (Data ▸ Get Data ▸ OData Feed), as do Tableau, Looker Studio and any tool that speaks OData.

Odoo access rights apply — for real

Each feed is tied to a real Odoo account, and every read runs with that account's permissions. Never as superuser. Groups, record rules, multi-company: what this account cannot see in the web client, the feed does not serve. A dedicated account with narrow permissions, and the dashboard can no longer leak what it should not show.

Fields that look like a secret — password, token, key — are rejected at configuration, regardless of the administrator's wishes.

One token per feed, and a wrong token reveals nothing

Each feed has its own token, revocable on its own without affecting the others. An unknown token, a disabled feed, an unknown table: the response is 404. Not 403 — you do not confirm to someone trying random addresses that they have found a valid one.

The tables and columns are yours

You choose the model, the fields, and an optional Odoo filter. Not a fixed list decided by the publisher. Each relational field can be paired with a readable column — “Customer” next to “Customer (ID)” — which saves rebuilding every relationship by hand in Power BI before the first chart.

Diagnostics, because a silent feed cannot be troubleshot

Every call leaves a trace: table, format, rows served, rejects, duration, calling address and the account whose permissions were applied. When a report shows wrong figures, you can see immediately whether the feed returned three rows or three thousand.

CSV and Excel as a fallback

The same table, as a file, for those without Power BI: .csv or .xlsx at the end of the address. The CSV is output with the semicolon separator and the BOM that Excel expects in French.

What the module does not do

It pushes nothing to the Power BI service and creates no dataset in Microsoft's cloud: Power BI comes to read, Odoo does not send. It performs no writes or write-backs from Power BI — the feed is read-only. It does not open the PostgreSQL database: an externally exposed SQL view would bypass all of Odoo's access rights, which is exactly what this module refuses to do.

Odoo Online: this module exposes a controller, so it cannot run on Odoo Online. It works on Odoo.sh and on a self-hosted installation.

What was verified, and what was not

The feed is backed by 44 automated tests, including real HTTP calls: OData v4 compliance (service root, $metadata, pagination), enforcement of access rights, 404 on an invalid token, CSV and Excel exports.

Rendering in Power BI Desktop itself has not been tested on a Windows machine. Compliance is verified against the OData v4 specification, which Power BI's native connector implements; but if your version behaves differently, write to us and we will fix it.