many2many_tags_skills

A skill on an employee is a pair: the skill itself and the level. Rendered as a plain tag, only the first survives, and a list of skills without levels is close to useless for anything except knowing that the skill exists.

This widget carries the extra information through. It swaps in a tag list component that can render more than a name, and supplies each tag with a flag saying whether the level attached is the default one for that skill.

The data for that flag is not something the view has to think about. The descriptor adds the field to what is loaded for each tag, so a view naming the widget gets it automatically.

Skills data is only as useful as its precision. A search for people with a given skill is a different query from a search for people who are advanced at it, and the interface has to make the level visible or nobody maintains it.

The mechanism is worth reusing: injecting a related field in the descriptor rather than asking every view to load it keeps the widget self-contained and means a later view cannot forget the field the tag depends on.

The usual usage

<field name="skill_ids"
       widget="many2many_tags_skills"/>

No options and no extra fields; the default level flag arrives with the tag data.

Restricting creation

<field name="skill_ids"
       widget="many2many_tags_skills"
       options="{'no_quick_create': True}"/>

Inherited from the tags widget, and useful where skills should come from a maintained list.

The plain tags widget

<field name="skill_ids" widget="many2many_tags"/>

Names only, with no level information on the tag.

Two changes, both small. The components map is extended so the tag list is the skills-specific one, and the method building each tag's properties adds the default level flag read from the tag's own record.

The descriptor then extends the related fields function so that flag is loaded. Doing it in the descriptor rather than in the view is the detail worth copying: a widget that needs data to render should ask for it itself, not depend on every view remembering.

What the flag actually looks like on screen belongs to the tag list component, not to this file, which is why the widget can stay this short.

On the development branch the tag components across Odoo are reworked, so this widget changes with them. The concept, a tag carrying its level context, is what to expect to survive rather than the exact structure.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable and this may still change; we re-verify this page after the release.

Reworked with the tag components. The development branch changes this widget as part of the wider rework of how tags are built. The injected field and the concept of a level-aware tag are unchanged; the structure around them is not.