slide_category_one2many

An eLearning course in Odoo is a single ordered list of content rows, where some rows are section headings and the rest are the actual lessons, videos, quizzes and documents. Storing both in one relation keeps ordering simple; showing both in one plain list makes the course structure invisible.

This widget fixes the display half. It swaps the embedded list's renderer for one that knows which rows are sections, renders those bold and lets their name stretch across the columns the lessons use. The drag handle column stays beside the title so sections can still be reordered.

It also splits how rows are created. The Add Section button carries a context flag, and the renderer only turns on inline editing when it sees that flag. So a section is typed straight into the list, while Add Content opens the lesson form, which is the right shape because a lesson has a dozen fields and a section has one.

Course structure is what makes an online course finishable. Learners abandon a flat list of thirty videos and complete the same thirty grouped into six modules, and the person building the course needs that structure to be cheap to create and easy to reorder. Typing a section title directly into the list, then dragging lessons under it, is about as cheap as it gets.

The pattern is also the honest answer to a question that comes up in most content projects: should sections be their own model? Odoo's answer here is no, keep one ordered relation and mark the structural rows, because that keeps drag-and-drop ordering across the whole course working with no special cases. The cost is that the display has to do the work, which is what this widget is.

The core usage, trimmed

<field name="slide_ids" widget="slide_category_one2many"
       mode="list,kanban">
  <list decoration-bf="is_category" editable="bottom">
    <field name="sequence" widget="handle"/>
    <field name="name"/>
    <field name="is_category" column_invisible="True"/>
  </list>
</field>

The column-invisible field is what makes the section detection work on Odoo 19.

The two create controls

<control>
  <create name="add_slide_section" string="Add Section"
          context="{'default_is_category': True}"/>
  <create name="add_slide_lesson" string="Add Content"/>
</control>

The context key on the first control is the entire difference between inline editing and a dialog.

Hiding lesson columns on section rows

<field name="completion_time" widget="float_time"
       invisible="slide_category == 'category'"/>

The renderer collapses section rows, but core also hides lesson-only values individually so nothing stray shows through.

The widget itself is short: swap the list renderer, default the embedded list to editable at the bottom, and allow rows to be opened. Everything characteristic lives in the renderer.

Its section handling is deliberately narrow. getSectionColumns keeps only the handle columns and then appends the title column with a colspan covering everything else, so a section row is exactly a drag handle and a stretched name. That is simpler than the survey equivalent, which preserves an extra count column, and it is why an eLearning section row shows nothing but its title.

Inline editing is restricted twice over. The renderer's create override only enables it when the create control's context sets the section default and the screen is not small, and a separate check declares that only section rows are inline editable at all. So a lesson row can never be typed into directly; clicking it opens the lesson form.

There is one keyboard behavior specific to this renderer. Enter, Tab and Shift+Tab in edit mode leave edit mode rather than moving to the next cell or the next row. On an ordinary editable list Enter creates another row, which for section titles would produce a stream of empty sections; here it closes the editor after the title is typed, which is what you want.

On Odoo 19 the renderer reads the section flag straight from the row's loaded data, so the field has to be in the subview. The development branch adds it as an injected related field on the descriptor, which removes that requirement and is the only functional change in the widget for Odoo 20.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable and this may still change; we re-verify the page after the release.

One functional improvement. The descriptor gains an injected related field for the section flag, declared writable, so the widget no longer depends on the embedded list loading is_category. A custom subview that forgot that field on Odoo 19 starts working on Odoo 20.

The rest of the diff is the migration to the new Owl props syntax, which the widget performs by inlining the x2many props because the base is not yet converted, with a source comment saying so. That affects patches, not views.