documentation_link

Configuration screens generate questions, and Odoo's answer is the small arrow link labeled Documentation you find next to settings sections: OAuth setup, digest emails, payment providers. Every one of them is this widget. Because it is a view widget, it appears in XML as a <widget> element rather than a <field>: it has no value, saves nothing, and exists purely to render a link.

What earns it a page is the URL logic. Give it a relative path like /applications/finance/accounting.html and the component builds the full docs URL with a version segment computed from your server: an Odoo 19 database links to the 19.0 documentation, an Odoo 18 database to 18.0, with no view change. Give it a full http(s) URL and it uses it verbatim.

For most companies this widget matters on the day you build your own settings pages. Custom modules with a res.config.settings section look native when they follow core conventions, and the documentation link is part of that convention. Pointing it at your own runbook, wiki page or SOP turns a bare settings toggle into something a new admin can self-serve.

The version-aware behavior is the quiet win for links into official docs: after an upgrade, every core Documentation link on every settings page points at the right version of the manual without anyone touching a view. If you hardcode absolute odoo.com URLs in your own modules instead of relative paths, you silently lose exactly that.

Core pattern: a settings section link

<widget name="documentation_link"
        path="/applications/general/auth/google.html"/>

Renders the standard Documentation link, expanded to the full odoo.com URL for the running server version.

Custom label and icon

<widget name="documentation_link"
        path="/applications/finance/accounting/taxes.html"
        label="How taxes work"
        icon="fa-book"/>

Linking your own documentation from a custom module

<widget name="documentation_link"
        path="https://wiki.yourcompany.com/odoo/expense-policy"
        label="Expense policy"/>

Anything starting with http:// or https:// bypasses the version logic and is used as-is.

Inside an alert box

<div class="alert alert-warning" role="alert">
  Configure your sender domain before going live.
  <widget name="documentation_link"
          path="/applications/general/email_communication.html"
          alert_link="1"/>
</div>

alert_link adds Bootstrap's alert-link class so the link inherits the alert's color scheme. This attribute is Odoo 19 and earlier; see the Odoo 20 section.

Reading extractProps settles a few details the docs never state.

The regex is minimal. The absolute-URL test is simply "starts with http:// or https://". A protocol-relative URL or a bare domain is treated as a docs path and glued after the version segment, producing a broken link. Always write the scheme.

The element is inline by design. The descriptor adds a d-inline class, so the link sits naturally inside a sentence, a label row, or an alert without wrapping div gymnastics. The base classes are o_doc_link me-2 in 19.

No record needed. The component declares the record prop optional and never reads it, so the widget works in any form context, including settings views that are not real records. That is also why nothing you do with it can dirty the form.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The following is read from the widget's file on the public development branch, which is unstable until feature freeze; we re-verify after release.

Three changes are visible. First, alert_link is removed. In its place the widget accepts a generic class attribute, string or object, so the old behavior becomes class="alert-link", and any custom class can ride along. Second, the default spacing changes subtly: the hardcoded me-2 margin moves into the default of the new class attribute. Third, the version-segment logic moves out of the component into a shared documentationUrl helper in @web/core/utils/urls, centralizing the rule other parts of the client already need. Behavior of relative and absolute paths is otherwise unchanged.