Book Image

Odoo 11 Development Essentials - Third Edition

By : Daniel Reis
Book Image

Odoo 11 Development Essentials - Third Edition

By: Daniel Reis

Overview of this book

Odoo continues to gain worldwide momentum as the best platform for open source ERP installations. Now, with Odoo 11, you have access to an improved GUI, performance optimization, integrated in-app purchase features, and a fast-growing community to help transform and modernize your business. With this practical guide, you will cover all the new features that Odoo 11 has to offer to build and customize business applications, focusing on the publicly available community edition. We begin with setting up a development environment, and as you make your way through the chapters, you will learn to build feature-rich business applications. With the aim of jump-starting your Odoo proficiency level, from no specific knowledge to application development readiness, you will develop your first Odoo application. We then move on to topics such as models and views, and understand how to use server APIs to add business logic, helping to lay a solid foundation for advanced topics. The book concludes with Odoo interactions and how to use the Odoo API from other programs, all of which will enable you to efficiently integrate applications with other external systems.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Understanding external identifiers


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.

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 for each record, during module installation. The 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 for the database ID so that we can use it whenever we need to reference a particular record.

Records defined in Odoo module data files use XML IDs. One reason for this is to avoid creating duplicate records when upgrading a module. The module upgrade will load the data files into the database again. We want it to detect the already existing records in order for them to be updated, instead of creating duplicate...