list_activity

Odoo tracks follow-ups as activities: calls to make, emails to send, tasks to do, each with a deadline and an assignee. list_activity is how that system surfaces inside list views. On each row it renders one compact cell: a clock icon colored by the state of the record's next activity, and a short text summarizing it.

The widget is placed on the activity_ids one2many that every model inheriting mail.activity.mixin has. It supports only that shape: supportedTypes in the source is ["one2many"], and the component reads its display data not from the o2m itself but from six sibling fields it loads automatically.

There is deliberately nothing to configure. The descriptor declares no options, so the widget looks and behaves identically in every list in Odoo, which is exactly the point: one glance, same meaning, everywhere.

List views are where operational follow-up actually happens: the AR clerk scanning overdue invoices, the sales manager scanning the pipeline. The activity column answers the only question that matters in that scan, what is the next step and is it late, without opening a single record.

The color coding does the heavy lifting. An overdue activity shows red, today shows orange, planned shows green, and the colors come from the shared activity component, so they mean the same thing in list, kanban and form chatter. Teams that learn to sort or filter by activity state (the searchable activity_state field this widget depends on) turn lists into working queues.

Because the widget is options-free, there is no per-view tuning to maintain. If your process needs different information in the cell, that is a customization of the activity data itself, the summary, the type, the exception flags, not of the widget.

The standard column

<list>
    <field name="partner_id"/>
    <field name="activity_ids" widget="list_activity"/>
    <field name="amount_total"/>
</list>

That is the whole integration. The six activity fields do not need their own elements; the widget declares them as dependencies.

Adding it to a custom model

# the model must inherit the activity mixin
class LibraryLoan(models.Model):
    _name = "library.loan"
    _inherit = ["mail.thread", "mail.activity.mixin"]

Without mail.activity.mixin the six dependency fields do not exist and the view fails to load.

The cell has two parts, and the source is precise about both.

The icon. A ListActivityButton subclass of the shared ActivityButton renders it. The subclass sets the default icon to fa-clock-o and clears the default state class, which is why you see a plain clock even on rows with no planned activity. When activities exist, the state drives the color, and an exception activity replaces the clock with the exception icon.

The text. The summaryText getter has a fixed precedence, straight from the source: if activity_exception_decoration is set the text is the word Warning; otherwise the next activity's activity_summary; otherwise the activity type's display name. If nothing is planned the cell shows only the clock.

The data. Six fieldDependencies are loaded with the row: activity_exception_decoration, activity_exception_icon, activity_state, activity_summary, activity_type_icon, activity_type_id. This is why the column works with a single field element in the XML, and why it costs six extra columns in the list's data fetch.

Clicking the cell opens the activity scheduler popover for the row, full width: the subclass renders the button with w-100 and truncates long summaries with text-truncate.

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

No options appear (the widget stays options-free) and the list_activity registration is unchanged. Two internal changes are visible: the component moves to the new Owl props system, and the default icon changes from FontAwesome's fa-clock-o to the schedule glyph of Odoo's own icon set, part of a codebase-wide icon migration. Expect the clock to look slightly different, not behave differently. We re-verify after release.