mail_composer_template_selector

The mail_composer_template_selector widget is the compact template picker that lives in the footer of Odoo's email composer and of send wizards such as the invoice send dialog. It is bound to the wizard's template_id many2one, but it does not render a normal many2one input: it renders a button with a vertical ellipsis icon (keyboard shortcut t) that opens a dropdown of matching mail.template records.

Matching means: templates whose model equals the composer's render_model. The fetch runs in two passes, first the current user's own templates, then shared templates with no owner, until a combined cap of 80. Selecting an entry writes it to template_id, which triggers the composer's server side onchange that swaps subject, body and attachments.

For teams that live in the composer, sales follow ups, invoice cover emails, recruitment replies, the two pass ordering is the quiet productivity feature: the templates you personally saved always sort above the company wide ones, so the one you use daily is one click away.

The management entries matter for governance. Save as Template snapshots the current composer content into a new template through a wizard, and Manage Templates jumps to the full template list filtered to yours. When a flow should not let users mint new templates, say a legally reviewed dunning email, the wizard can pass one context key and both entries vanish, leaving a pick only dropdown.

<!-- Core usage in the invoice send wizard footer (account module) -->
<field name="template_id" widget="mail_composer_template_selector"/>

<!-- Pick only variant: hide Save as Template and Manage Templates -->
<field name="template_id" widget="mail_composer_template_selector"
       context="{'hide_mail_template_management_options': True}"/>

Three behaviors are read straight from the source. First, visibility: the entire dropdown is wrapped in a check on the record's can_edit_body field, so composers that forbid body editing show no template button at all; that is a field dependency, meaning the widget forces the field into the data fetch even if the view does not contain it.

Second, Save as Template does not silently create anything: it saves the composer record first and then launches the open_template_creation_wizard action on it, so an invalid composer form blocks the save path before any template exists.

Third, Search More opens a SelectCreateDialog with noCreate and single selection, filtered to the render model, and only appears when the fetch hit the 80 cap. Odoo 18 behaved differently on every point that matters: the cap was 7, there was no Search More, and each template row carried delete and overwrite icons guarded by confirmation dialogs, a management surface Odoo 19 removed entirely in favor of the templates list view.

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 functional changes so far: the file is being migrated to the new props system and the templates list now initializes empty instead of undefined, a hardening detail. The two pass fetch, the 80 cap, both field dependencies and the context key all survive unchanged. We re-verify after the release.