survey_question_trigger

Conditional display in a survey means a question only appears when an earlier one got a particular answer. The word earlier is doing a lot of work there: a trigger that comes later in the survey can never fire, because the answer does not exist yet when the question is reached.

This widget is the icon that tells you so. Beside each question it shows whether that question's trigger is sound, and its tooltip explains the problem when it is not.

There are two failure modes it catches. A trigger positioned after its target, and a survey configured to pick questions at random, which ignores triggers altogether.

Broken survey logic is expensive because it fails silently and in front of respondents. A question that never appears looks like a question you did not ask, and the data gap is only obvious once the responses are analyzed.

Catching it at design time, in the list where the questions are being reordered, is the only place the fix is cheap. The reordering is exactly when the breakage is introduced.

Placing it

<widget name="survey_question_trigger"/>

Inside the question list. No attributes.

What the tooltip says when sound

Displayed if "Yes".

The triggering answers, joined.

What it says when misplaced

Triggers based on the following questions will not
work because they are positioned after this question

With the offending questions named.

The comparison is the part worth understanding. For each triggering question the widget finds the matching record in the survey's own question list, then compares sequences. When the current question's sequence is lower than the trigger's, the trigger is misplaced. When the sequences are equal, the record identifiers break the tie.

That tie-break matters more than it sounds. Freshly reordered rows often share a sequence until the save recomputes them, and without the identifier comparison the check would go quiet exactly when it is most needed.

The random selection case short-circuits before any of that: if the survey picks questions at random, every trigger is meaningless and the widget says so once rather than per question.

The third state is the interesting one. When every trigger question has been deleted from the list but not yet saved, the widget deliberately renders nothing rather than the normal icon. The source explains that showing the normal state would flicker, because the trigger itself is removed on the next save anyway.

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 this page after the release.

Converted to the newer conventions. The development branch replaces the state and reference hooks with their Owl 3 equivalents and drops the element check from the effect condition. The three states and the comparison logic are unchanged.