Product and product template in Odoo 10

Question

What is the need for two different tables for Product Master in Odoo ? How product.product and product.template differ ?

Answer 1

Odoo has two models/tables for products because of product variants:

• product.product contains variant level information.
• product.template contains information that is same to all variants.

You can use product variants in Odoo by turning on "Products can have several attributes, defining variants" in Sales / Settings. With variants the product.template contains the main product (e.g. T-Shirt) and product.product contains the variants (e.g. T-Shirt size M, T-Shirt size L,...).

If you do not use variants, these two models and tables have almost the same content.

You can find more information on Odoo product variant from https://www.odoo.com/documentation/user/10.0/ecommerce/managing_products/variants.html.