account_file_uploader

Digitizing incoming documents is the highest-traffic path into Odoo Accounting, and this widget is its front door. account_file_uploader renders an upload trigger, by default a plain Upload link, and handles everything after the file picker closes.

The flow it runs, verified in the source: every selected file is first created as an ir.attachment, stripped of any default_* keys from the surrounding context so the create cannot fail on unknown defaults. When the batch is complete, it calls create_document_from_attachment on account.journal with all attachment ids and opens the action the server returns, which lands you on the freshly created draft documents. Any per-file notices the server sends back are shown as sticky notifications, one per file.

Because it extends the account module's shared DocumentFileUploader component, the same machinery also powers the Upload buttons of the invoice list and kanban views; the widget documented here is the journal-dashboard incarnation that reads its journal from the kanban record.

This is the workflow that decides whether accounts payable likes Odoo. Drop twenty supplier PDFs on the purchase journal and you get twenty draft vendor bills, each with its source document attached, ready for the OCR or AI digitization step to fill in amounts and partners. No manual encoding, no lost originals, a clean audit trail from file to posted move.

The journal awareness is the subtle part. The same widget on a sale journal creates customer invoices instead, and on a bank or miscellaneous journal it creates plain journal entries. Teams that understand this route documents by dropping them on the right card, which makes the dashboard itself the sorting desk.

The dashboard usage, verbatim from core

<widget name="account_file_uploader" title="Upload Invoices"
        btnClass="file_upload_kanban_action_a"/>

From the sale-journal card. The purchase and miscellaneous cards use the same element with btnClass="btn btn-primary oe_kanban_action" and the default Upload text.

A custom toggler template

<widget name="account_file_uploader"
        template="my_module.BigDropButton"/>

The template attribute replaces the whole toggler with your own QWeb template, which receives btnClass and linkText as props. This is how you turn the small link into a large drop target without touching the upload logic.

The context assembly explains the routing. getExtraContext reads the kanban record's data and returns default_journal_id set to the journal's id plus default_move_type computed from the journal type: sale becomes out_invoice, purchase becomes in_invoice, and everything else falls back to entry. That context rides along on the create_document_from_attachment call, which is why the same widget produces different document types per card. Outside a record, the widget still works, it simply sends no journal defaults and lets the server pick.

Two more details from the source: the attachments are created with a cleaned context, every key starting with default_ is filtered out before the ir.attachment create, a guard against dashboard contexts leaking invalid defaults into the attachment model. And the keyboard shortcut people associate with this feature, shift+i, belongs to the sibling account.AccountViewUploadButton template used by the invoice list and kanban toolbars, not to the dashboard widget itself.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. We read the widget and its base component on the public development branch at the time of writing; the branch is unstable and can still change before release.

account_file_uploader.js itself is byte-identical to 19. The shared base is refactored: DocumentFileUploader becomes a mixin-style AbstractDocumentFileUploader factory, attachment payloads switch from the datas key to raw, and the upload-complete context is rebuilt through new getters. XML usage is untouched; custom modules that extend the base class or patch onFileUploaded will need a review. We re-verify once Odoo 20 ships.