text_scheduled_date

The text_scheduled_date widget is how Odoo 19's composer lets you write an email now and send it later. It renders a single button with a clock icon and the s hotkey. Clicking it opens a dialog with three presets, tomorrow morning at 8:00, tomorrow afternoon at 13:00, and Monday morning at 8:00, plus a custom datetime input. Saving writes the chosen moment back to the wizard; once set, the button highlights and reads Sending Aug 27, 8:00 AM in the user's locale format.

The source file explains its own naming: the composer stores the scheduled date in a text field while mail.scheduled.message uses a real datetime field, so the file registers two widgets around one shared component. text_scheduled_date serializes and deserializes the string; its sibling datetime_scheduled_date passes the luxon value through untouched.

Send Later is one of those features that quietly changes how teams work: recruiters queue Friday rejections for Monday morning, salespeople writing at midnight schedule for 8:05, and support answers land inside business hours across time zones. The presets are the point. By making tomorrow morning one click, the widget steers users toward humane sending times instead of a full calendar they have to think about.

Odoo itself reuses the widget outside the composer, in the recruitment refuse wizard, which is the pattern to copy: any custom wizard that posts messages can offer the identical Send Later experience by adding one text field named scheduled_date and this widget, provided the server side honors the value the way mail.compose.message does.

The core pattern: composer footer

<field name="scheduled_date"
       widget="text_scheduled_date"
       invisible="composition_batch or composition_mode != 'comment'"/>

Core hides the button in batch mode: mass sends are scheduled through the mailing machinery, not per-message. The recruitment refuse wizard ships the same field without conditions.

The sibling on Scheduled Messages

<field name="scheduled_date" widget="datetime_scheduled_date"/>

Same dialog, same presets, but bound to a datetime field and without the clear action, since a scheduled message must keep a date until sent or discarded.

The dialog seeds its custom picker with now plus one hour, minutes rounded up to the next multiple of five and seconds zeroed, and passes minDate: now so past moments cannot be picked. When reopened with an existing value, it reverse-matches the value against the three presets and preselects the matching radio, falling back to custom with the stored moment loaded. The Monday preset is computed as the next weekday 1, always in the future, so clicking it on a Monday schedules for the following week.

The two widgets differ in exactly two lines each: the value getter and the save shape. The text variant deserializes the stored string into a luxon DateTime and serializes back on save, writing an empty string to clear; the datetime variant passes the value straight through and sets isRemovable false, which removes the clear option from the dialog entirely.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026, and the development branch is unstable until feature freeze, so treat the following as provisional; the page is re-verified after release.

The visible changes are cosmetic and internal: the clock icon moves from FontAwesome's fa-clock-o to the new oi set with data-icon="schedule", props gain runtime type declarations through the new Owl typing API, and dialog state moves to the proxy API. The hardcoded scheduled_date key, the presets, and both registrations are unchanged.