many2one

Pick any Odoo form: the Customer on a sales order, the Product on an order line, the Responsible on a task. Each of those inputs is the many2one widget: a text box that searches another model as you type, shows matches in a dropdown, and stores a link to the record you pick.

The dropdown carries more than search results. Depending on your access rights and the widget's options it appends Search More... (a full search dialog), Create "..." (quick create from the typed text) and Create and edit... (a popup form). Once a record is selected, an internal link button opens it, and the link resolves to /odoo/<model>/<id>, so middle-click and open-in-new-tab work like on any web link.

Because it is the registered default for the many2one field type, you almost never write widget="many2one" in XML. Core itself does so only 6 times. You interact with this widget through its options instead, and those options are inherited by a whole family of derived widgets, from many2one_avatar to stock.forced_placeholder, all built on the same buildM2OFieldDescription helper in the source.

Relational fields are where data quality is won or lost. The two decisions this widget lets you make per view are deceptively important.

Who is allowed to create records from here? Quick create is fast, and fast is how you end up with three versions of the same customer, one per typo. Setting no_quick_create on customer-facing forms while leaving full create available forces new records through the complete form, where required fields and duplicate warnings live. Setting no_create outright is the right call for controlled masters such as tax grids or warehouses.

How does search behave on large tables? By default the dropdown fires a search on focus, before a single character is typed. On a model with a million partners that is a wasted query per click. The Odoo 19 search_threshold option delays the search until the user has typed a minimum number of characters, which is measurably kinder to both the database and the user reading the results.

In Studio the widget comes with the field type, and its most useful options are exposed as checkboxes.

1. Open the view in Studio and drag a Many2One field from the New Fields section, or select an existing many2one field.

2. In the Properties tab, pick the related model when prompted.

3. Tick Disable creation to remove the create entries from the dropdown, and Disable opening to remove the link that opens the record.

4. Set Typeahead search to a number of characters to delay the search on large models.

5. Click Domain to filter which records can be selected.

Studio's checkboxes cover no_create, no_open, the domain and the search threshold. The finer-grained create controls, allowing quick create but not the popup form or the reverse, are the no_quick_create and no_create_edit options, XML only.

The two undocumented options are also XML only: can_scan_barcode, which adds a barcode scan button on mobile, and create_name_field, which tells quick create which field of the target model receives the typed text when it is not called name.

Lock down a controlled master

<field name="warehouse_id" options="{'no_create': True, 'no_open': True}"/>

No create entries, no link out of the form. The user can only pick from existing warehouses.

Allow full create, block one-click quick create

<field name="partner_id" options="{'no_quick_create': True}"/>

New customers must go through the Create and edit popup form, where your required fields apply.

Delay search on a huge model

<field name="partner_id" options="{'search_threshold': 3}"/>

No query fires until the user has typed 3 characters. New in Odoo 19.

Quick create into a model whose name field is not name

<field name="employee_id" options="{'create_name_field': 'legal_name'}"/>

The typed text lands in legal_name instead of name when the record is created.

Odoo 19 rebuilt this widget around a standalone Many2One component plus a computeM2OProps helper, and that refactor explains several behaviors worth knowing.

Quick create is lazier than it looks. Choosing Create "..." does not call the server. The source's quickCreate merely updates the field with {id: false, display_name: name}; the real name_create happens when the record is saved. Cancel the form and nothing was created.

Multi-line display names are split. If the target model's display_name contains line breaks (partner addresses in some contexts), only the first line renders as the link and the remaining lines render as extra text below it, trimmed line by line.

The barcode path has a limit of 2. With can_scan_barcode on a mobile device, a scan runs a name_search with limit: 2: exactly one match selects it directly, anything else drops the barcode into the input and falls back to the normal search flow.

A record with no display name renders as "Unnamed". That string comes from this widget, not from the ORM.

One dead knob: the component declares a searchLimit prop, but extractProps never fills it from the view, so there is no XML option to change the dropdown's result count on this widget.

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.

No option changes. The declared options, the two undocumented ones, and the registration are all unchanged on master. The diff is internal: the component migrates to the new props-schema API (useProps with typed validators) and exports a reusable many2OneFieldProps schema. Custom widgets that spread Many2OneField.props the old way will need the new import, and the stock.forced_placeholder source on master already shows the conversion pattern.

We re-verify this page against the shipped release before updating the table.