An external identifier, also called XML ID, is a human-readable string identifier that uniquely identifies a particular record in Odoo. They are important when loading data into Odoo, allowing us to modify an existing data record, or to reference it in other data records.
We will first 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.
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 provide a way to reference a related record without the need to know the actual database ID assigned to it. The XML ID provides a convenient alias...