Inside a method or a shell session, self represents the current model, and we can only access that model's records. To access other models, we should use self.env. For example, self.env['res.partner'] returns a reference to the Partners model (which is actually an empty recordset). We can then use search() or browse() on it to generate recordsets.
The search() method takes a domain expression and returns a recordset with the records matching those conditions. An empty domain [] will return all records.
If the model has the active special field, by default only the records with active=True will be considered.
A few optional keyword arguments are available, as shown here:
- order is a string to be used as the ORDER BY clause ...
