project_is_favorite

On project cards, lists, and the project form, Odoo shows a star that toggles the is_favorite boolean. Starred projects float into the user's favorites. The widget behind it is a fourteen-line wrapper around the standard boolean_favorite field: same star icons, same click handling, same options.

The entire reason it exists is one line in extractProps. The base favorite widget takes its readonly state from the record's dynamic readonly info, meaning that if the user cannot edit the project, the star goes dead. project_is_favorite overrides that: readonly is true only when the view literally writes a readonly attribute on the field. A project you can see but not edit still has a live star, because favoriting is a personal preference, not an edit of the project.

Favorites look like a cosmetic feature until you watch how teams actually navigate Odoo. The projects a person stars become their default filter, their kanban home, and effectively their working set. If starring silently fails for everyone without project edit rights, which is most of the company on most projects, adoption of the favorites workflow quietly dies and everyone scrolls the full project list forever.

That is the scenario this widget prevents, and it is a pattern worth copying in custom development: any per-user preference stored on a shared record, subscribed flags, watch lists, personal pins, should not inherit the record's edit permissions in the UI. If you have built a custom "follow" boolean and users report the control is greyed out, this widget is the reference implementation of the fix.

Note that the widget only fixes the client side. The server still has to allow writing is_favorite for non-editors, which the project model handles by routing the flag into a separate many2many of favorited users rather than a plain column.

Kanban card star, as core uses it

<field name="is_favorite" widget="project_is_favorite" nolabel="1"/>

Form title star that does not autosave

<field name="is_favorite" widget="project_is_favorite"
       options="{'autosave': False}" nolabel="1"/>

This is the exact configuration on Odoo's project form: the star toggles with the form's other edits and is committed by the normal save.

Forcing the star dead

<field name="is_favorite" widget="project_is_favorite" readonly="1"/>

Because the widget reads only the literal attribute, this is the one way to disable it. Record rules and form-level readonly will not.

The override is worth reading precisely because of what it throws away:

extractProps: (fieldsInfo, dynamicInfo) => {
    return {
        ...booleanFavoriteField.extractProps(fieldsInfo, dynamicInfo),
        readonly: Boolean(fieldsInfo.attrs.readonly),
    };
}

The spread first computes the base props, including readonly: dynamicInfo.readonly, then the next line overwrites it. dynamicInfo.readonly is where record rules, form states, and readonly expressions arrive, so all of them are discarded. Only a hard-coded readonly="1" (or any truthy attribute value) in the view XML survives.

Two consequences catch developers. First, a readonly expression like readonly="stage_id == 4" compiles into dynamic info, not into a literal attribute, so it is ignored: the star stays clickable in every stage. Second, the attribute check is a bare Boolean() on the raw attribute string, so even readonly="0"... renders the star dead, because the string "0" is truthy in JavaScript. If you need a conditionally dead star, wrap the field in two conditionally visible variants instead.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The notes below are read from the public development branch, which is unstable until feature freeze; we re-verify this page against the shipped release.

The widget's own file is unchanged on master. The action is in what it inherits: the base boolean_favorite descriptor on the development branch deletes the autosave option, and its update call no longer passes a save flag. If that lands, options="{'autosave': False}" becomes a no-op, and Odoo's own project form usage will presumably be adapted. Any custom view relying on the star not saving mid-edit should be retested on 20.

The star icon set also changes upstream, with the base widget moving from Font Awesome stars to Odoo's new icon glyphs, a purely visual shift.