How to Connect to Live Odoo Data from Gemini CLI (via CData Connect AI)

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Leverage the CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server to enable Gemini CLI to securely read and take actions on your Odoo data for you.

Gemini CLI is a command-line interface tool that provides direct access to Google's Gemini AI models for code generation, text analysis, and conversational AI capabilities. When combined with CData Connect AI Remote MCP, you can leverage Gemini CLI to interact with your Odoo data in real-time through natural language queries. This article outlines the process of connecting to Odoo using Connect AI Remote MCP and configuring Gemini CLI to interact with your Odoo data.

CData Connect AI offers a dedicated cloud-to-cloud interface for connecting to Odoo data. The CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server enables secure communication between Gemini CLI and Odoo. This allows you to ask questions and take actions on your Odoo data using natural language through Gemini CLI, all without the need for data replication to a natively supported database. With its inherent optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect AI efficiently channels all supported SQL operations, including filters and JOINs, directly to Odoo. This leverages server-side processing to swiftly deliver the requested Odoo data.

In this article, we show how to configure Gemini CLI to conversationally explore (or Vibe Query) your data using natural language. With Connect AI you can query and interact with live Odoo data, plus hundreds of other sources.

About Odoo Data Integration

Accessing and integrating live data from Odoo has never been easier with CData. Customers rely on CData connectivity to:

  • Access live data from both Odoo API 8.0+ and Odoo.sh Cloud ERP.
  • Extend the native Odoo features with intelligent handling of many-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many data properties. CData's connectivity solutions also intelligently handle complex data properties within Odoo. In addition to columns with simple values like text and dates, there are also columns that contain multiple values on each row. The driver decodes these kinds of values differently, depending upon the type of column the value comes from:
    • Many-to-one columns are references to a single row within another model. Within CData solutions, many-to-one columns are represented as integers, whose value is the ID to which they refer in the other model.
    • Many-to-many columns are references to many rows within another model. Within CData solutions, many-to-many columns are represented as text containing a comma-separated list of integers. Each value in that list is the ID of a row that is being referenced.
    • One-to-many columns are references to many rows within another model - they are similar to many-to-many columns (comma-separated lists of integers), except that each row in the referenced model must belong to only one in the main model.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to call server-side RFCs within Odoo.

Users frequently integrate Odoo with analytics tools such as Power BI and Qlik Sense, and leverage our tools to replicate Odoo data to databases or data warehouses.


Getting Started


Step 1: Configure Odoo Connectivity for Gemini CLI

Connectivity to Odoo from Gemini CLI is made possible through CData Connect AI Remote MCP. To interact with Odoo data from Gemini CLI, we start by creating and configuring a Odoo connection in CData Connect AI.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
  2. Select "Odoo" from the Add Connection panel
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Odoo.

    To connect, set the Url to a valid Odoo site, User and Password to the connection details of the user you are connecting with, and Database to the Odoo database.

  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Odoo Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

Add a Personal Access Token

A Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI from Gemini CLI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.

  1. Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
  2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
  3. Give the PAT a name and click Create.
  4. The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, we are ready to connect to Odoo data from Gemini CLI.

Step 2: Configure Gemini CLI for CData Connect AI

Follow these steps to configure Gemini CLI to connect to CData Connect AI:

  1. Ensure Gemini CLI is installed on your system. If not, install it using npm:
    npm install -g @google-gemini/cli
  2. Locate your Gemini CLI settings file. If the file doesn't exist, create it:
    • Linux/Unix/Mac: ~/.gemini/settings.json
    • Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.gemini\settings.json
  3. Add the CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server to the mcpServers object in your settings file. Replace YOUR_EMAIL and YOUR_PAT with your Connect AI email address and the PAT created previously:
    {
      "mcpServers": {
        "cdata-connect-cloud": {
          "httpUrl": "https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp",
          "headers": {
            "Authorization": "Basic YOUR_EMAIL:YOUR_PAT"
          }
        }
      }
    }    
    For example, if your email is [email protected] and your PAT is Uu90pt5vEO..., the Authorization header would be:
    "Authorization": "Basic [email protected]:Uu90pt5vEO..."
  4. Save the settings file. Gemini CLI will now use the CData Connect AI MCP Server for data operations.

Step 3: Query Live Odoo Data with Natural Language

With Gemini CLI configured and connected to CData Connect AI, you can now interact with your Odoo data using natural language queries. The MCP integration allows you to ask questions and receive responses from the Odoo data source in real-time.

Start using Gemini CLI to explore your data:

  1. Open your terminal and start a Gemini CLI session:
    gemini
  2. You can now use natural language to query your Odoo data. For example:
    • "Show me all customers from the last 30 days"
    • "What are my top performing products?"
    • "Analyze sales trends for Q4"
    • "List all active projects with their current status"
  3. Gemini CLI will automatically translate your natural language queries into appropriate SQL queries and execute them against your Odoo data through the CData Connect AI MCP Server.

The combination of Gemini CLI's natural language processing capabilities and CData Connect AI's robust data connectivity enables you to explore and analyze your Odoo data without writing complex SQL queries or needing deep technical knowledge of the underlying data structure.

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