Odoo 12 - XML files not triggering server reload with --dev=all

Question

New Odoo user here.

It's been a few days since I started messing around with Odoo(v12). I managed to build a module, including creating models, views and menus. It's working like a charm, though there is one issue that is really bothering me.

I've read that running odoo-bin with the --dev=all arg -- which requires watchdog, by the way -- is supposed to trigger a server restart whenever .py or .xml files are changed inside one of the addons folders.

The server does restart when I modify PYTHON files, but so far, even after trying it out for hours, I can't seem to make the same thing work for XML files.

For reference, I'm building the openacademy module from the official documentation, and I'd like for the server to read the views from the XML files instead of the database and reload on change, so I can customize the forms and views and see the result without having to upgrade my module every single time.

--dev=all, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work.

Can anyone help?

Edit: here's the full command I'm using to start up Odoo:

py odoo-bin -c odoo.conf --dev=all

P.S: I'm running Odoo 12 source on Windows 10 64bit

Answer 1

Late to the party but as I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out on both Mac and Ubuntu it's worth noting that the --dev xml does not update to reflect every change in a .xml file. I was modifying menus and seeing nothing and thinking it was broken but from some investigation I discovered that the changes only pick up modifications to ir.ui.view models and (I think from looking at the source code) ir.rule models.

Answer 2

--dev=all actually works in conjunction with watchdog, so if you have watchdog package installed in your running odoo python environment, any change in your addons .py file with cause watchdog to notify running server and the server will reload automatically. You can actually see those messages if you have loglevel set to info. In case view update, changes in xml file doesn't actually reload the server but causing a refresh in the browser automatically updates the view. But, if there is any error in the view definitions, i faced this situation that odoo is not updating the changes. So make sure that there is no error in the xml views and update should be done automatically after page refresh.