boolean_favorite

The widget draws a star for a boolean field: FontAwesome's filled star when the value is true, the outline when false, with an accessible label reading Add to Favorites or Remove from Favorites. Clicking flips the value. That is the entire visible surface, and core applies it wherever "mark this one as mine" is the gesture: favorite products, favorite journals on the accounting dashboard, shortlisted applicants in recruitment.

The invisible surface is the part worth reading this page for: by default the click does not just flip the value, it saves the whole record on the spot. In a list or kanban that is always what you want. In an open form with half-finished edits, it may not be.

Favorites are a personal productivity feature bolted onto shared data, and that tension decides where the star belongs. A star on products backing "my frequently used items" speeds up daily picking. A star that a whole team shares as an ad hoc status marker becomes ambiguous within a month, because nobody agrees what starred means, and it quietly competes with the real status field.

Our rule: use the star for personal or team shortcuts with no workflow meaning, and never let it substitute for a proper stage or state. When leadership starts asking for reports grouped by the star, that is the signal the data model wants a real field, and the star can go back to being a shortcut. The one-click instant save is also a data point here: it makes starring frictionless, which is the goal, but it also means the gesture writes to the database immediately, so it belongs on fields where an accidental click is harmless.

Standard favorite star

<field name="is_favorite" widget="boolean_favorite"/>

Star that waits for Save

<field name="is_favorite"
       widget="boolean_favorite"
       options="{'autosave': False}"/>

Compact star column in a list

<list>
  <field name="is_favorite" widget="boolean_favorite" nolabel="1"/>
  <field name="name"/>
</list>

With nolabel, the widget requests a fixed 20 pixel column, giving the classic slim star column at the left edge of a list.

The model side

is_favorite = fields.Boolean(string="Favorite")

For per-user favorites, core models typically compute the boolean from a many2many of users behind the scenes; the widget itself neither knows nor cares, it just toggles the boolean it is given.

Three source-level details explain most field-team questions about this widget.

Readonly means silent. The click handler starts with a readonly check and simply returns. No error, no visual disabled state beyond the standard muted rendering, the star just does not respond. If users report "the star is broken," check the field's readonly modifier first.

The star never disappears. The descriptor hardcodes isEmpty to false, so unlike most fields, a false value does not render as an empty cell in lists. The outlined star is always there to invite the click, which is the entire interaction design of the widget.

The save is the record's save. With autosave on, the update goes through the standard record save, meaning required-field validation runs too. A record with a missing required field will refuse to save when the user just clicked a star, surfacing a validation error from a gesture the user perceives as trivial. That is the deep reason to consider autosave: False on data-entry-heavy forms.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. These observations come from the public development branch, which can change until feature freeze, and this page is re-verified against the shipped release.

The autosave option is deleted. The development branch removes the option from the descriptor, the prop from the component and the save flag from the click handler. The star still toggles the value, but the write follows the standard edit flow of the surrounding view. Views passing autosave will not break, the option is simply ignored, but flows that relied on the instant save, such as starring from a form without ever pressing Save, will behave differently and deserve a retest.

The icon leaves FontAwesome. The filled and outlined star classes are replaced by the new icon set, with the filled state expressed through an oi-filled class, part of the icon migration visible across the branch.

If your team leans on star-driven flows, put them on the checklist for an Odoo 20 upgrade review.