Odoo ORM common method - update records

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ORM update records methods are commonly used and yet under-documented.

You may find the Odoo ORM documentation here, which, as usual, is very hard to understand. My suggestion is try to find how this ORM is used in the Odoo source code.

(0, 0, values) adds a new record created from the provided value dict.
(1, id, values)updates an existing record of id id with the values in values. Can not be used in create().
(2, id, 0) removes the record of id id from the set, then deletes it (from the database). Can not be used in create().
(3, id, 0) removes the record of id from the set, but does not delete it. Can not be used in create().
(4, id, 0) adds an existing record of id id to the set.
(5, 0, 0) removes all records from the set, equivalent to using the command 3 on every record explicitly. Can not be used in create().
(6, 0, ids) replaces all existing records in the set by the ids list, equivalent to using the command 5 followed by a command 4 for each id.

Below is the example on how to update unit price in an existing invoice line.

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invoices = self.env['account.invoice'].browse(self.env.context.get('vendor_bill_id'))
invoice_lines = self.env['account.invoice.line'].browse(self.env.context.get('invoice_line_id'))
# the fields to update 
inv_value = {
    'price_unit': xxxx,
}
invoice[0].write({
    'invoice_line_ids': [
        (1, invoice_line[0].id, inv_value),
    ]
})
    

This is an example how you can add a new record to an existing one2Many line.

vals = {'customer': customer}
vals['start_date_time'] = start_time
start_time_in_hours = start_time.hour + start_time.minute / 60
vals['start_time'] = start_time_in_hours
end_time = start_time + timedelta(0, rec.visit_duration * 60)
vals['end_date_time'] = end_time
end_time_in_hours = end_time.hour + end_time.minute/60
vals['end_time'] = end_time_in_hours
vals['sequence'] = count
vals['state'] = rec.state
start_time = end_time + timedelta(0, prep_time * 60)
rec.visit_customer_lines = [(0, 0, vals)]