I'm new to Odoo and one area where I'm having trouble is understanding the context around the python code you can put in server actions (what I can do, and what I can't), and what I can and can't do through XML data files.

If anybody could point me to examples of addons which do this, and thorough reference documentation and/or tutorials, it would help.

Edit: Digging into the XML, I have a more specific question which could be answered by pointing me at the right documentation. I can see that you add rows to a table in the DB, using XML record tags, like so:

        <record id="stock_location_locations" model="stock.location">
            <field name="name">Physical Locations</field>
            ...snip..
        </record>

Where model="" the model name, but what is the id attribute? Where can I read about what is supposed to go in there? The stock.location model doesn't have an ID field, but I would expect it to have a surrgate key called that which is managed by the ORM, so I don't know what to put there in the XML. Is it just string which is unique to the XML record tag?