boolean_phone

The boolean_phone widget answers one question on the livechat operations screen: is this agent on a call right now? It renders the boolean as a phone glyph when true, and when false it renders nothing, no unchecked box, no dimmed icon, just empty space. That asymmetry is the design: on a list of forty agents, the eye finds the three phones instantly, which a column of checkboxes would never allow.

Implementation-wise it is a template swap on the standard boolean widget. The component subclasses BooleanField, replaces the template with a three-line conditional icon, and registers under its own name with the display name In call. Everything else, supported types included, comes from the base descriptor.

Live Chat supervisors staff queues in real time: who is available, who is typing, who is voice-calling a customer through Discuss. The in-call flag is the piece that used to be invisible, and rendering it as a spot icon turns the agents list into a wallboard, three phones means three agents are tied up, route accordingly.

The pattern generalizes to any presence-style boolean where only the true state matters: on break, out of office, flagged for review. An icon-when-true widget communicates state density that checkbox grids cannot, and this widget is the minimal template for building your own.

The core pattern: agents list on the channel form

<list no_open="1" create="0">
    <field name="partner_id" string="Agent" widget="many2one_avatar_user"/>
    <field name="livechat_is_in_call" widget="boolean_phone" nolabel="1"/>
</list>

Note the nolabel: the column header stays empty, so the icons float next to the avatars, which is how the kanban variant uses it too.

Three lines of template are still worth reading closely. The icon carries role="img" and title="In a Call", giving hover text to sighted users and an accessible name to screen readers, details that homegrown icon widgets usually forget. And because the false branch renders nothing, the widget contributes zero width when inactive, so list columns using it should be narrow and label-free, exactly as core configures them.

If you fork the pattern for your own presence flag, the whole recipe is: subclass BooleanField, point static template at a conditional icon, spread booleanField in the registration, and register your name. The display name string is what Studio and developer tooling show for the widget, worth setting even for internal widgets.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026, and the development branch remains unstable until feature freeze, so treat this as provisional; the page is re-verified after release.

The widget's JavaScript is byte-identical to 19.0 on the branch. The only change is in the template, where the FontAwesome classes fa fa-fw fa-phone give way to the new icon set as oi oi-fw oi-filled with data-icon="phone". Anyone styling or testing against the fa-phone class will need the selector updated; behavior is otherwise untouched.