event_icon_selection

On an event form, the Communication tab lists the scheduled emails and SMS with a small status icon per row: a check for sent, an hourglass for scheduled, gears for running, a cross for cancelled. That column is event_icon_selection.

The component is refreshingly small: a template that renders one <i> tag, an icon getter that looks the current field value up in a map, and a title getter that builds the tooltip. What makes it worth a page is where the map comes from: extractProps forwards the entire options dictionary as the icon map. There is no declared option name; the option keys are your field's values and the option values are complete icon class strings.

It supports char, text and selection fields, because all it needs is a string to look up. Whatever the field type, the widget is pure display: it renders no input in any mode and never writes the record.

Status columns are where list views win or lose their readability. Text statuses make every row the same visual weight; icon statuses let the eye find the exceptions, the canceled cross among twenty green checks, without reading a word.

The event communication list is a good template for the pattern: a scheduler table where each row's state is instantly visible in a 20-pixel column. The same recipe works for any custom model with a small, closed set of states, quality check results, sync statuses, document stages, wherever your team scans rather than reads.

Because the icon map lives in the view XML rather than in code, adapting it is a view edit, not a module: adding a new state to the map is one more key in the options dict, which also makes it one of the few widgets a functional consultant can reconfigure end to end without touching JavaScript.

How core applies it (event communication list)

<field name="mail_state" widget="event_icon_selection" string=" " nolabel="1"
       options="{'sent': 'fa fa-check', 'scheduled': 'fa fa-hourglass-half', 'running': 'fa fa-cogs', 'cancelled': 'fa fa-times-circle'}"/>

Four selection values, four icon classes, nothing else. The empty string plus nolabel triggers the 19-new 20px column width.

Reusing it on a custom status field

<field name="x_sync_status" widget="event_icon_selection" nolabel="1"
       options="{'ok': 'fa fa-check text-success', 'error': 'fa fa-exclamation-triangle text-danger', 'pending': 'fa fa-clock-o text-muted'}"/>

The class string is passed verbatim, so Bootstrap color utilities ride along with the icon class. The module is event, so the widget exists only on databases with Events installed.

Three source details are worth knowing before you adopt it.

The tooltip ignores your labels. title is computed as the raw value with the first character upper-cased. For single-word values that reads fine, sent becomes Sent. For snake_case values it leaks the technical name: in_progress becomes In_progress. The selection's display label is never consulted, so pick presentable value keys or accept technical tooltips.

The empty-value crash. With no value, record.data[name] is false, and calling charAt on it throws a TypeError that takes the row's rendering down. Core avoids it because mail_state is a required selection with a default. On nullable fields, guard with an invisible condition or set a default.

Version drift is in the plumbing, not the behavior. Odoo 16 read the map from attrs.options and the value from the removed props.value API; 17 moved to record.data; 18 added the modern static props syntax and the listViewWidth hint of 20px for label-less columns, kept in 19. The icon map contract has been stable the whole way, until the Odoo 20 branch changes it, see below.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026; the development branch is not final until release.

On the branch, the widget joins the migration from Font Awesome to Odoo's new oi icon font, and that changes the options contract: each map value becomes a two-element array, ['error', 'oi-filled'] style, where the first entry is the data-icon glyph name and the second the class. The template renders oi plus the class with the glyph in data-icon. A 19-style string value would be indexed character by character, string index 0 is a single letter, so existing maps break rather than degrade. Core's own usage in the communication list is rewritten to the new format in the same commit. We re-verify at release.