kanban_activity

Activities are Odoo's follow-up system: schedule a call, a to-do, a document request, against any record on a model that inherits the activity mixin. On kanban boards, the entire system compresses into one small clock icon per card, and that icon is this widget.

The component itself is remarkably small, 32 lines in the Odoo 19 source, because it delegates the real work to the shared ActivityButton from the mail module. What the widget contributes is placement inside the card and, crucially, its fieldDependencies declaration: six activity-related fields that Odoo fetches automatically for every card so the icon can be drawn correctly, without any of them appearing in your view definition.

Clicking the clock opens the activity popover: the list of pending activities with their deadlines, mark-done buttons, and scheduling of new ones, all without leaving the board.

Follow-up discipline is pipeline hygiene. A CRM where every card shows a green, orange or red clock is a CRM where "who dropped the ball" is answered by looking, not by running a report. The color rules encode exactly that triage: red for overdue, orange for today, green for planned ahead.

The exception layer is the part managers underuse. When an automated process flags a problem, a bounced email on a lead for instance, the exception decoration replaces the clock with a warning icon in warning or danger color, making broken records visible at board level. If your team builds automations, emitting activity exceptions is a cheap way to surface failures where people already look.

Because scheduling happens in the popover without opening the record, boards stay the single working surface: triage a column, schedule the follow-ups, and move on.

The standard card pattern

<kanban>
  <templates>
    <t t-name="card">
      <!-- card content -->
      <field name="activity_ids" widget="kanban_activity"/>
    </t>
  </templates>
</kanban>

That is the entire integration: one field, one widget, six dependencies fetched automatically.

The model side

class Vehicle(models.Model):
    _name = "fleet.vehicle"
    _inherit = ["mail.activity.mixin", "mail.thread"]

The activity mixin provides activity_ids and every dependency field the widget needs.

The visible behavior all lives in the shared ActivityButton component, and reading it settles the icon logic precisely.

Color comes from activity_state: overdue is danger red, today is warning orange, planned is success green, and no activities leaves a muted clock. The state itself is computed by the mixin against each activity's deadline, timezone-aware.

The icon has a priority order. If an exception decoration is set, the exception icon wins, colored warning or danger. Otherwise, once any activity exists, the next activity type's configured icon is used, a phone for calls, an envelope for emails, falling back to a generic tasks icon. Only a record with no activities and no exception shows the plain clock.

The tooltip is informative before the click: exception records say Warning, otherwise the next activity's summary, otherwise its type name.

One list-view behavior hides in the click handler. When the same button runs inside a list where multiple records are selected including the current one, the popover targets the whole selection, so marking done or scheduling applies to all selected records at once. On kanban cards there is no selection, so it is always per record, but it is the same component doing both jobs.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. We diffed this widget against the public development branch at the time of writing; the branch is unstable until feature freeze, and we re-verify after release.

No functional changes. The six fieldDependencies, the registration and the delegation to ActivityButton are unchanged. The only movement is internal, the migration to the new Owl props typing, which affects JavaScript patches and nothing in your views. The board-level activity workflow your team knows carries into 20 as-is, pending the final release.