hr_presence_status

Open the Employees app and every card carries a small status mark: a filled green circle for someone currently logged in, a muted circle outside working hours, a hollow circle for an archived employee. That mark is hr_presence_status, rendered over the hr_icon_display selection field that HR computes from login activity, contracts and leaves.

The widget itself is minimal: it picks a Font Awesome icon and a color class from the selection value and prints the selection label as text. The interesting part is what the rest of the HR suite does to it. hr_holidays patches the same component so employees on approved leave show a plane icon and a label like "On leave, back on Aug 24". hr_homeworking patches it again so the icon becomes a house, a building or a map marker depending on today's work location. The stack of patches is why the same widget shows different things on different databases: what you see depends on which HR modules are installed.

Odoo 19 added a second face: in form views the registered form.hr_presence_status variant renders a rounded outline pill (btn-outline-success and friends) instead of the small dot, so the employee form header gets a proper status chip while lists and kanbans keep the compact circle.

Presence display sounds cosmetic until you manage a hybrid team from Odoo.

It answers "can I reach this person right now" without a chat app round trip. Reception, dispatch and team leads use the kanban dots dozens of times a day; with hr_homeworking installed, the same glance also answers "are they at home or in the office today", straight from the work location schedule.

What it is not: a time tracker. The status derives from technical presence signals (logins, IP or IM presence depending on configuration) plus leave records. Treating the green dot as attendance data leads to bad conclusions; that is what the Attendances app is for. We make this distinction explicit in every HR rollout, because conflating the two is the most common misreading of this widget.

Note that both employee views ship with it already wired; the customization conversation is usually about adding it to custom views (helpdesk assignment boards, planning dashboards) where knowing who is present changes who gets the work.

As the employee kanban uses it

<field name="hr_icon_display" widget="hr_presence_status" invisible="not show_hr_icon_display or not id"/>

The pill on a form header (Odoo 19)

<!-- In a form view, the same widget name resolves to the pill variant -->
<field name="hr_icon_display" widget="hr_presence_status"/>

No XML difference: the form view automatically picks the form.-prefixed registration, which is how Odoo serves the dot in lists and the pill on forms from one widget name.

On a custom assignment view

<field name="employee_id" column_invisible="1"/>
<field name="employee_icon_display" widget="hr_presence_status" string="Presence"/>

Expose the employee's hr_icon_display through a related field and the dot works anywhere.

Reading the full patch stack turned up one finding no documentation mentions.

The pill's holiday colors are dead code in 19.0. The hr_holidays_homeworking bridge module patches all four presence components. For the two base components it calls its patch factories: patch(HrPresenceStatus.prototype, patchHrPresenceStatus()). But for the two pill components it passes the factory itself, without the parentheses: patch(HrPresenceStatusPill.prototype, patchHrPresenceStatusPill). The patch helper copies properties off what it receives, and a function carries no color getters, so on databases with Time Off plus Remote Work installed, the form pill never shows the holiday color override that the small dot shows. Nothing crashes, which is why it went unnoticed.

Label logic is layered by super calls. Base label = the selection label. hr_holidays wraps it with "back on" plus leave_date_to. The private variants prefer the leave type's display name via current_leave_id. Each patch adds its own field dependencies so those extra fields load with the view.

The private variants exist for confidentiality. hr_presence_status_private renders the same visuals but is patched to show the actual leave type (Sick Leave versus Legal Leave) only where the viewer is allowed to see it; public employee views keep the generic label.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The notes below are read from the public development branch and are not final until release.

This widget is heavily reworked on master. The pill files are deleted after a single release, so form.hr_presence_status disappears again. The hr_homeworking patch is gone too: its home, office and other locations move into the base widget in hr, now drawn with the new oi icon set (circle, home, business, location_on) instead of Font Awesome. The component gains an isActive getter with an active field dependency, bakes hr_presence_state and the work location fields into its dependencies, and styles itself as an absolutely positioned round badge via additionalClasses. A new hr_attendance patch file appears as well. Anything styled or patched against the 19 structure will need review. We re-verify against the shipped release.