Although developers tend to prefer to leverage the full power of Python to write new modules, it is sometimes not possible to do so; typically on managed hosting solutions which do not allow the deployment of custom Python code like the odoo.com platform.

However, the flexible nature of Odoo is meant to allow customizations out of the box. Whilst a lot is possible with Studio, it is also possible to define models, fields and logic in XML files. This makes it easier to develop, maintain and deploy these customizations.

In this talk, we will learn how to define models, fields and logic in XML data files and bundle them into a module. These are sometimes called importable modules, or data modules. We will also see the limitations of this approach to module development.