hr_employee_chat

HR records are about people, and the fastest thing you can do with a person is talk to them. hr_employee_chat is the widget that makes that one click: a small speech-bubble link on the employee form that opens a Discuss direct message with the employee's user.

The component is nine lines of setup around a hook. It registers as a view widget, mounts useOpenChat with the current model, and its template renders an anchor only when two conditions hold: the record has an id, so it exists in the database, and user_id is set, so there is an account to chat with. Fail either condition and the widget renders literally nothing, no disabled state, no tooltip.

The widget's value is contextual reach. A manager reviewing a leave conflict, an HR officer checking a document, a colleague looking up a department, they are all already on the employee form, and the chat icon turns look up into reach out without a trip through Discuss search. On the public employee directory, where most lookups happen, the same icon works for every colleague with an account.

The silent-vanish behavior doubles as a data-quality signal. Icons missing across the directory almost always mean employees were created without linked users, which also breaks leave approvals, expense flows and appraisals. A quick filter on employees without user_id usually explains the mystery faster than any debugging.

Adding the chat icon to a custom employee view

<field name="user_id" invisible="1"/>
<widget name="hr_employee_chat"/>

The invisible field is the part people forget; without it the icon simply never appears.

What the template checks

<a t-if="props.record.data.user_id and props.record.resId"
   t-on-click.prevent="() => openChat(props.record.resId)" .../>

Both conditions in one line: a linked user and a saved record.

The interesting part is what the widget delegates. useOpenChat(resModel) comes from Discuss's web layer and resolves the person from whatever model calls it, which is why the identical element serves hr.employee and the restricted hr.employee.public: the hook, not the widget, knows how to get from an employee id to a chat partner. Opening behavior follows Discuss conventions, a chat window docked in the corner on desktop rather than a navigation away from the form.

The click passes props.record.resId, the employee's id, not the user's. That distinction matters when patching: custom code that feeds a user_id into the hook double-resolves and opens a chat with the wrong partner or none. And since the anchor renders only on saved records, the icon appearing mid-edit after the first save is expected behavior, not a refresh bug.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. We read the widget's file on the public development branch at the time of writing; the branch is unstable and this page will be re-verified after release.

Three changes land together. The widget gains its first option, show_label, extracted from the options dictionary, which appends a Discuss text label after the icon. The useOpenChat hook is dropped for a direct call to the mail store, store.openChat({ employeeId }). And the icon joins the FontAwesome retirement, fa-comments becoming the filled forum glyph of the new icon set. XML from 19 keeps working; patches on the hook do not.