remaining_days

Deadlines are questions, not data. When a user looks at an activity date, the question is never "what date is it", it is "how much time do I have". The Remaining Days widget answers that directly by rendering a date or datetime field as a relative phrase, computed against today in the user's timezone: In 3 days, Today, 2 days ago.

It is a read-oriented widget. In display mode you get the phrase plus color coding; the moment the field becomes editable, the component delegates to the standard date picker, which is why Odoo's own Studio documentation recommends setting the field to read only. Core uses it anywhere urgency matters more than the calendar date: project deadlines, activity dates, stock scheduled dates.

The difference between a list showing 06/15/2026 and one showing Overdue by 2 days in red is the difference between a report and a to-do list. Relative dates remove a mental subtraction step from every row scan, and the color rules move the eye straight to trouble. On queues of any size, that is measurable time, and more importantly it is missed-deadline insurance.

The default thresholds encode a sane policy: red once overdue, orange on the due day, bold for both. If your process needs an earlier warning, amber at three days out for example, that is exactly what the widget's expression-based option allows, and it is a view-level change, not a development project.

One planning note: the widget goes absolute past 99 days. For long-horizon dates like contract renewals, users will see a plain date again, which is usually the right call but surprises teams who expected In 8 months.

This widget has a first-class, documented Studio path. Odoo Studio is available on Enterprise plans.

1. Open the form or list you want to change and click Studio in the top menu.

2. Drag a Date or Date & Time field onto the view, or select an existing one.

3. In the Properties tab, set Widget to Remaining Days.

4. Enable Read only. The official documentation recommends it, because in edit mode the widget shows a plain date picker and the relative label disappears.

Tip: pair it with a Conditional visibility rule if the date only matters in some states, for example hiding a deadline once a task is done, so the red overdue label does not linger on finished work.

Studio sets the widget; it does not reach the color logic. Two frequent requests need view XML.

Changing the thresholds, such as turning the label orange three days before the deadline instead of on the day, means passing the classes option with your own expressions, shown in the examples below. Studio has no interface for it.

Changing what counts as urgent per record type, for example different warning windows for invoices and deliveries, means different options per view, and sometimes a computed field feeding the date. Both are quick jobs for someone fluent in Odoo views, and the kind of small change we ship as Odoo customization work.

Standard usage

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

Defaults apply: bold at zero days or less, red when negative, orange at exactly zero.

Custom warning window: orange from three days out

<field name="date_deadline"
       widget="remaining_days"
       options="{'classes': {'danger': 'days < 0', 'warning': 'days >= 0 and days <= 3', 'bf': 'days <= 3'}}"/>

Your dictionary replaces the default one, so restate every rule you want to keep.

Muted instead of alarming, for informational dates

<field name="next_review_date"
       widget="remaining_days"
       options="{'classes': {'muted': 'True'}}"/>

Every value renders gray: relative convenience without the urgency theater.

The display logic has three tiers, all read from the source.

Within 30 days either way, the label always counts in days: In 28 days, never In 4 weeks. The code forces the day unit below that threshold to avoid vague phrasing.

Between 31 and 99 days, it hands off to the browser's relative calendar formatting, so you may see Next month or In 3 months, capitalized by the widget.

Past 99 days in either direction, it gives up on relative phrasing entirely and shows the normal formatted date. There is no option to change this cutoff in Odoo 19.

Two more rules matter in practice. Archived records are exempt from coloring: the source checks the record's active state and returns no classes at all, so an overdue date on an archived record renders plain, which is deliberate noise reduction. And the day difference is computed on calendar days, both sides truncated to the start of day, so a datetime due at 23:59 tonight is Today all day, not In 10 hours.

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

The widget is renamed. On the development branch the remaining_days directory, template and registration are gone, replaced by relative_date. The registry name changes with it, and at the time of writing no remaining_days alias is registered in the new file, which would make this a breaking rename for views that reference the widget by name. The display name, supported types and the classes option survive unchanged.

The algorithm is rebuilt. The flat 99-day cutoff and the 30-day day-unit rule are replaced by a graded unit table: within a week it counts days, within a month it counts weeks, within a year months, beyond that years, with an explicit calendar-boundary guard so month arithmetic does not misfire around month ends. Expect In 4 weeks and In 3 years where 19 showed a formatted date.

If your views use remaining_days, budget a find-and-replace to relative_date in your Odoo 20 upgrade checklist, pending what ships in September.