Every Odoo team hits the same friction with reports. A user clicks Print on an invoice, delivery slip, or sales order, Odoo streams back a PDF, and the browser immediately drops it into the Downloads folder or hands it to a plugin the user has to hunt through. Just to confirm the right template rendered — correct company logo, tax lines, page breaks — someone opens the file manager, launches a viewer, checks, then deletes a file they never wanted. Multiply that across hundreds of documents a day and you get cluttered download folders, misprinted batches, and support tickets that begin with "the layout looks wrong." Odoo core has no in-browser preview surface for QWeb reports: ir.actions.report is wired to return the binary as an attachment or stream, and the standard report controller has no viewer step in between.

We build a focused extension that inserts a real preview stage in front of that download. Technically, we override the report action flow so a report_type of qweb-pdf opens an in-browser viewer dialog — an OWL component embedding a pdf.js canvas — instead of triggering an immediate file save. The component calls the existing /report/pdf/<report_name>/<ids> controller (or a thin custom controller we add for streaming) via the standard JSON-RPC action service, receives the rendered bytes, and paints them page-by-page with zoom, page navigation, fit-to-width, and a Print button that targets only the document iframe. Because we reuse Odoo's own IrActionsReport._render_qweb_pdf and wkhtmltopdf pipeline, the preview is byte-identical to what the printer or the eventual download would produce — no second rendering engine, no drift between "preview" and "real" output.

The build is configured to your rules rather than a generic toggle. We add a preview_before_print flag on ir.actions.report (surfaced in the report form view via XML) so you decide per report — or per report category — whether Print opens the preview or keeps the legacy direct download. Access is governed through ir.model.access.csv and record rules so users only ever preview documents they are already entitled to see, and an optional automated action can log preview events for audit. Everything ships as a versioned module with a proper __manifest__.py, pinned to your target series, and is tested against Community and Enterprise (the viewer is framework-level, so it works in both; Enterprise's studio-defined reports are supported the same way).

Delivery is build-to-order. After a short scoping call we confirm exactly which reports get the preview, your Odoo version and edition, and any branding or audit requirements, then produce a fixed quotation. Typical delivery is 2–4 weeks from confirmed scope: we develop against a staging copy, run UAT with your team, and hand over installable source, docs, and a git repository. Pricing starts from $249 (indicative, single-company base scope); the number of report templates in scope, multi-company preview rules, custom streaming controllers for very large PDFs, and edition-specific report handling increase the quoted scope.