product_label_section_and_note_field

The product_label_section_and_note_field widget is applied to product_id on invoice, purchase and PoS order lines. It renders a many2one autocomplete for the product and, next to it, an auto resizing textarea for the line description, even though the description actually lives in a different field, the line's name.

The label logic is the interesting part. When displaying, the widget takes the name value and strips the product's display name out of it, showing only the remainder as the editable label. When parsing your edit back, it prepends the product name again, storing product\nyour label in name. That is why deleting the label text resets the description to just the product name.

The widget also carries the section and note styling for the whole line: display_type of line_section renders bold, line_subsection semi-bold, and line_note italic.

For finance and sales teams this widget is why Odoo invoice lines feel like a document editor: one column holds the product, a free text description underneath, and structural section and note rows in between, without switching views. Customer facing descriptions can be rewritten per invoice without touching the product master.

The show_label_warning option adds quiet quality control: when a line's description no longer contains the product name, the label renders in warning orange. Accounting teams use that to spot lines where someone overwrote the description so aggressively that the invoice no longer says what was sold.

<!-- Core usage on customer invoice lines (account module) -->
<field name="product_id"
       widget="product_label_section_and_note_field"
       optional="conditional"/>

<!-- With the label warning and no quick create -->
<field name="product_id"
       widget="product_label_section_and_note_field"
       options="{'show_label_warning': True, 'no_quick_create': True}"/>

The parent one2many field on the move uses the companion widget product_label_section_and_note_field_o2m, which supplies the list renderer that hides the separate Description column whenever the Product column is visible, merging both into one cell.

Two behaviors are worth knowing before you customize. First, the readonly logic: the widget keeps the product cell editable even when the list cell reports readonly, until the parent document reaches posted or cancel state or is locked. That is intentional, so draft invoices opened from readonly contexts still allow line edits, and it is implemented both in the field widget and in the o2m list renderer.

Second, the column merge in the o2m renderer is conditional per document type: on vendor bills the Product column defaults to hidden, and on customer invoices the product, quantity and UoM columns default to hidden when the Sale app is not installed. Odoo reads the parent's move_type and an is_sale_installed flag to decide, which is why the same widget shows different default columns on bills and invoices.

In Odoo 18 the widget was self contained inside the account module with its own autocomplete subclasses. Odoo 19 moved the shared logic to ProductNameAndDescriptionField in the product module, added show_label_warning, added the semi-bold line_subsection type, and split the o2m companion into its own file.

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 frontend props system (a useProps declaration replacing static props, part of a framework wide wave), and show_label_warning plus the inherited many2one options all survive. The o2m companion file is also still present. We re-verify after the release.