float_time_selection

Odoo stores durations and times-of-day alike as floats: 8.25 can mean eight and a quarter hours, or a quarter past eight in the morning. The plain float_time widget formats such a float as HH:MM but still asks users to type. float_time_selection goes one step further for the time-of-day case: clicking the input opens a popover with two dropdowns, hours 0 through 23 and minutes 0 through 59, so picking 07:30 for the start of a half-day leave takes two clicks and zero format knowledge.

The component extends FloatTimeField and keeps its input fully functional: users can still type either a HH:MM string or a decimal, and the widget converts between the two representations both ways. Under the hood the value remains an ordinary float of hours on the record.

Since 19.0 the readonly rendering is localized through Luxon: the same stored 13.5 reads 1:30 PM under an English (US) language and 13:30 under most European ones.

The widget exists because of a very specific HR pain: employees requesting a half day from, say, 09:00 to 13:00 were previously asked to express that as decimal hours, and someone always typed 9.3 meaning 09:30. Every one of those slips flows into allocation math and payroll exports. Two dropdowns remove the format guessing entirely, which is why Odoo's own Time Off forms are the widget's only core users.

If you run custom HR or scheduling models, shift start times, booking slots, cut-off times, this is the pattern to reuse: keep the storage as a float (it sums, averages and exports trivially) and put this widget on the form. Your data team keeps clean numbers while your users see a clock. The one design note: it is a time-of-day control with a 0 to 23 hour list, so it is the wrong pick for durations that can exceed a day; use float_time there.

How core uses it (time off request)

<field name="request_hour_from"
       widget="float_time_selection"/>

No options needed; the popover and conversions are the default behavior.

Reuse on a custom shift model

<field name="shift_start"
       widget="float_time_selection"/>
<!-- shift_start = fields.Float() stores 13.5 for 1:30 PM -->

The model side stays a plain float, so aggregations and pivot views keep working on the raw hours.

Three mechanics from the source explain the widget's edge behaviors.

The write lands on popover close. Dropdown changes update internal state; only the popover's onClose pushes the float onto the record. A user who picks values and then clicks elsewhere still gets their choice saved, because clicking away is what closes the popover, but nothing hits the record while both dropdowns are being adjusted.

Typed input is dual-format. The change handler first tries to split on a colon; failing that it parses the raw text as a decimal float. Typing 7:45 and typing 7.75 produce the same stored value. Invalid halves (say 7:xx) fall through to the decimal path.

Minutes are rounded from the float. Converting a stored float to the dropdowns rounds minutes to the nearest whole minute, so a float like 8.333 displays as 08:20. Any sub-minute precision is preserved in storage until the user re-picks a value, at which point it is replaced by the whole-minute choice.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable until release, and we re-verify this page against the shipped version.

Three changes are visible so far. The readonly display is reworked to compute directly from the float and always render an h:mm a style time. The base float_time widget gains a typing-preview popover on master, and this widget explicitly disables it with an empty openPopover override so the preview cannot fight the selection popover. And through the inherited descriptor it picks up float_time's master-branch option renames, where show_seconds replaces the misdeclared display_seconds and new numeric and unit options appear. None of this changes view XML that uses the widget without options.