project_task_state_selection

Odoo separates two ideas that project tools often blur: the stage is a column on the kanban board and belongs to the project, while the state is the small colored bubble on the card and belongs to the task itself. This widget renders that state. It extends the generic state_selection widget and hardcodes the project palette: a neutral bubble for In Progress, an orange exclamation for Changes Requested, a green bubble for Approved, a green check for Done, a red cross for Canceled and an hourglass for Waiting.

The dropdown is context-aware. A normal task offers all five settable states. A task in Waiting, which is a state the dependency system sets rather than a person, offers only Done and Canceled: the source builds the option list conditionally, so users cannot hand-set a working state on a task that is blocked by another.

The two-track design solves a real reporting problem. Stages answer "where is this task in our process", states answer "does this task need attention". A task can sit in the Review column with Changes Requested, and a dashboard can count approval bottlenecks without caring which column each project uses. Teams migrating from Trello-style boards usually need this explained once, and then their standup gets faster because the cards say who is blocked.

The toggle mode matters for personal productivity use. On private tasks, the ones in your inbox with no project attached, the widget switches to a single-click check: click to complete, click to reopen. No dropdown, no ceremony. The same behavior can be forced on any view with one option, which is worth doing for to-do style lists where Done is the only state anyone sets.

One operational note: state changes save immediately by default, including the rest of the edited record. That is inherited behavior, and it is the right default on kanban cards, but on form views it means the state bubble is effectively a save button.

How core places it on the task list

<field name="state"
       widget="project_task_state_selection"
       nolabel="1"/>

Forcing single-click toggle on a custom to-do view

<field name="state"
       widget="project_task_state_selection"
       options="{'is_toggle_mode': True}"/>

With the toggle active, a click flips Done to In Progress and back. The dropdown with all states remains reachable in views where the widget renders the chevron.

Keeping the record out of autosave

<field name="state"
       widget="project_task_state_selection"
       options="{'autosave': False}"/>

Inherited from the base widget: with autosave off, picking a state only stages the change and the user saves manually.

Reading the source explains three behaviors that look odd from the outside.

The styling is view-dependent, decided in code. On kanban, list, activity and calendar views, and on small screens, the widget renders a borderless icon button. On desktop form views it renders a rounded pill whose border color follows the current state, and it highlights while hovered. None of this is configurable; the methods check the view type directly.

The command palette integration is form-only. When the widget mounts on a form view it registers a "Set state as..." smart action under Alt+F, listing exactly the states the dropdown would offer. On every other view type the command is not registered, and the widget instead runs the base setup.

Toggle mode has two triggers. The explicit is_toggle_mode option, or the task having no project_id. That second trigger is why the widget declares a field dependency on project_id: private tasks get the one-click check without any configuration.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. These notes come from the public development branch, which can change until feature freeze; we re-verify this page against the shipped release.

The visible changes are cosmetic but will matter to anyone who patched the component. The FontAwesome icons are replaced by the new icon set: Changes Requested moves to an error glyph, Done to check_circle, Canceled to cancel and Waiting to hourglass_empty, with a parallel new classIcons map controlling the oi icon classes. The view-type checks swap kanban for card, following the kanban-to-card rename across the web client, and small-screen detection moves from env.isSmall to the ui service.

Option-wise nothing moves: is_toggle_mode and the inherited autosave and hide_label survive unchanged.