Understanding the external identifier concept

An external identifier, also called an XML ID, is a human-readable string identifier that uniquely identifies a particular record in Odoo. They are important for loading data into Odoo, allowing us to modify an existing data record or reference it in other data records.

First, we will introduce how external identifiers work, and how we can inspect them. Then, we will learn how to use the web client to find the external identifiers for particular data records, since this is frequently needed when creating add-on modules, thus extending existing features.

How external identifiers work

Let's begin by understanding how identifiers work. The actual database identifier for a record is an automatically assigned sequential number, and there is no way to know ahead of time what ID will be assigned to each record during module installation. External identifiers let us reference a related record without the need to know the actual database...