selection

Every Selection field in Odoo that does not name another widget renders through this one. It draws a closed dropdown of the values defined on the field, shows the label of the current value, and writes the chosen value back on change. Since Odoo 19 the dropdown is Odoo's own SelectMenu component rather than the browser's native select, which is why it now looks consistent across browsers and opens as a bottom sheet on small touch screens.

The less known half: point it at a many2one and it becomes a closed pick list of related records. It fires one name_search on the relation, honoring the field's domain, and renders the results as plain choices. No autocomplete, no Create option, no record opening. That is exactly what you want when a relation has a handful of stable rows and the full many2one experience is overkill.

Dropdowns are the cheapest data quality tool in Odoo. A Selection field with five well named values produces reports that group cleanly, kanban columns that mean something, and automations that fire on predictable states. Free text in the same place produces none of that.

The decision that matters is not the widget, it is the value list. Keep it short enough that users never scroll past the choice they need, and resist encoding two dimensions into one list. When you see values like Urgent - Electrical and Urgent - Plumbing, that is two fields pretending to be one, and every report built on it will need untangling later.

The many2one mode earns its keep on configuration style relations: a company's three warehouses, four approval levels, a fixed set of rate cards. Users get a tap friendly closed list, and administrators keep the values as real records they can rename and archive without a developer.

Odoo Studio (Enterprise) covers this field end to end.

1. Open the form you want to change and click Studio.

2. Drag Selection from the Add a field panel onto the form. Studio prompts you for the list of values, one per line.

3. In Properties, the Widget defaults to Selection, which is this dropdown. From the same dropdown you can switch the display to Badge, Badges, Radio, Priority or Status Bar without touching the stored values.

4. To change the choices later, select the field and click Edit Values. Renaming a value relabels it everywhere. Deleting one does not clean up records that already store it, which matters below.

Tip: enable developer mode before adding the field so you can set a sane technical name. Reports, automations and integrations will reference it forever.

Studio manages the value list and the widget switch, and its general properties cover placeholders and conditional visibility. What it does not reach:

Filtering choices per view. Showing a different subset of values on different forms of the same model is what filterable_selection and dynamic_selection exist for, and wiring those is view level work.

Reacting to another field. Making the available choices depend on a second field on the record needs one of the filtering widgets or a developer built domain, not Studio.

Cleaning up removed values. Studio will happily delete a selection value that thousands of records still store. The stored strings stay behind, and in Odoo 19 they break the display, as covered in the deep dive. Plan a data migration whenever a value is retired. If that is on your roadmap, our Odoo customization team does this cleanup routinely.

Default dropdown on a selection field

<field name="state"/>
<!-- identical to -->
<field name="state" widget="selection"/>

Placeholder text while empty

<field name="priority_level"
       widget="selection"
       placeholder="Choose a level..."/>

A many2one as a closed dropdown

<field name="warehouse_id"
       widget="selection"
       domain="[('company_id', '=', company_id)]"/>

The domain is applied inside the name_search call, so users only ever see permitted rows. Because the widget offers no create path, this doubles as a soft lockdown of the relation.

The many2one mode is one cached query. The widget calls name_search once with an empty term plus your domain, and the ORM's default name_search limit of 100 records applies. There is no Search More and no paging, so a relation with hundreds of rows silently shows an incomplete list. Past a few dozen records, use a real many2one instead.

Kanban cards save instantly. extractProps hardcodes autosave to true when the view type is kanban, so changing the dropdown on a card writes the record immediately, with no Save step. In form views the same widget participates in the normal dirty record flow.

Choices with an empty label are hidden. The options getter filters out any selection entry whose label is an empty string. Developers sometimes use that to keep a legacy value storable but not offerable.

Removed values break the readonly display in 19. The label lookup does this.options.find(...)[1] with no guard, so a record holding a value that no longer exists in the selection throws a TypeError when the field renders its current label. This is the crash behind "the form went blank after we removed an old status." The Odoo 20 branch guards the lookup and shows the orphaned value as a grayed out, unselectable choice 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 and can change until feature freeze. We re-verify this page against the shipped release.

The kanban instant save disappears. The autosave prop and its kanban special case are removed on master. Dropdown changes on cards go through the standard update flow like any other edit, so flows that relied on the immediate write need review.

Orphaned values stop crashing. A stored value missing from the selection renders as a disabled, grayed out choice labeled with the raw value, fixing the Odoo 19 TypeError described above.

Offline resilience for many2one mode. The name_search call catches connection loss and falls back to displaying the current value instead of erroring.

The card rename reaches this widget. The view type check for the readonly passthrough now tests card instead of kanban, and the bottom sheet triggers on any touch device rather than only small screens.

Planning a jump to 20 when it lands? Our Odoo migration team tracks these branch changes so your views do not have to.