relative_date

relative_date renders a date or datetime as a distance from now: three days ago, in four weeks, in two months. Odoo 19 did this with remaining_days, which leaned on Luxon's default relative formatting.

The new widget adds a threshold table that decides which unit to use:

const RELATIVE_RANGES = [
    { thresholdUnit: "weeks",  displayUnit: "days",   maxUnits: 1 },
    { thresholdUnit: "months", displayUnit: "weeks",  maxUnits: 1, verifyCalendarBoundary: true },
    { thresholdUnit: "years",  displayUnit: "months", maxUnits: 1 },
    { thresholdUnit: "years",  displayUnit: "years",  maxUnits: Infinity },
];

The first entry whose gap fits wins, and the date renders one level more precisely than the threshold that matched. A date 24 days away is within one month, so it shows in weeks: In 4 weeks.

This is a small change with a real effect on any screen where people triage by date. Odoo 19 could describe anything between one and sixty days as "next month", which is useless for deciding what to chase today.

Odoo 20 gives you weeks where weeks are meaningful. A follow-up in four weeks and a follow-up next month now look different, because they are different.

If you are upgrading, the important part is not the improvement. It is that remaining_days is gone with no alias, so every view that used it needs editing.

Basic use:

<field name="date_deadline" widget="relative_date"/>

Conditional styling through the undocumented option:

<field name="date_deadline" widget="relative_date"
       options="{'classes': {'text-danger': 'days < 0', 'bf': 'days <= 0'}}"/>

The Odoo 19 line that no longer works, and its replacement:

<!-- Odoo 19, removed in Odoo 20 with no alias -->
<field name="date_deadline" widget="remaining_days"/>

<!-- Odoo 20 -->
<field name="date_deadline" widget="relative_date"/>

One entry in the threshold table carries a flag the others do not:

{ thresholdUnit: "months", displayUnit: "weeks", maxUnits: 1, verifyCalendarBoundary: true },

The source explains the case it defends against. Measuring from 30 January, the gap to 1 March floors to one month, which would match this entry and render the date in weeks. But 1 March is in the month after next, so weeks is the wrong unit and the result misleads.

Months are not a fixed length, so a naive floor division produces this class of error near boundaries. The guard checks the actual calendar rather than trusting the arithmetic.

This matters more than it sounds on a pipeline or deadline list, because the errors cluster at month ends, which is exactly when people are reviewing what is due.

Worth being precise about the Studio angle too. The descriptor keeps displayName: _t("Remaining Days"), the same label the Odoo 19 widget carried. So someone configuring a view through Studio sees the same name before and after the upgrade and has no signal that the underlying widget was replaced. Only the XML changed.

Introduced in Odoo 20 as the replacement for remaining_days.

We verified that remaining_days is gone completely: the string does not appear anywhere in the Odoo 20 addons tree, in JavaScript or XML. There is no alias, so a view carrying it logs a missing-widget warning and falls back to rendering the field by its type, which for a date means an ordinary date display rather than a relative one.

The classes option carries over from the old widget unchanged, so styling written for remaining_days keeps working once the widget name is updated.