time_period_selection

When Odoo estimates future demand for a replenishment, it offers to base that estimate on a past period. Expressed as stored selection values those periods are unreadable: last year, last year plus one month, last year plus two, last year's quarter. Nobody can hold that in their head while deciding.

This widget rewrites those four labels into what they actually mean, computed from today's date. Open the dialog in January and the options read as the named months of the previous year; open it in March and they have shifted accordingly.

It also tidies the list. The underlying field carries entries with an empty key or an empty label, used as separators or placeholders, and the widget drops them so the dropdown contains only real choices.

This is a small piece of interface work with an outsized effect on whether a feature gets used. A buyer choosing a demand baseline needs to compare periods, and comparing "last year plus two" against "last year quarter" is guesswork. Comparing "March 2025" against "Jan-Mar 2025" is not.

It is also a good argument for computing labels in the browser rather than on the server. The months are relative to today, so a server-computed label would be wrong the moment the record was cached or the day rolled over. Doing it at render time makes the question of staleness disappear.

The core usage

<field name="based_on" class="oe_inline"
       widget="time_period_selection"/>

No options. The widget recognizes the field's selection keys and rewrites the four it knows about.

The keys it rewrites

last_year            # e.g. "January 2025"
last_year_m_plus_1   # e.g. "February 2025"
last_year_m_plus_2   # e.g. "March 2025"
last_year_quarter    # e.g. "Jan-Mar 2025"

Anything else in the selection is shown with its declared label.

Values that disappear

# dropped from the rendered list
(False, "")
("anything", "")

Entries with a false key or an empty label are filtered out before rendering.

The label computation starts from the first day of the current month a year ago, then adds one and two months for the next two options. That means the three month labels are always consecutive and always in the previous year relative to today, regardless of when the record was created.

The quarter label is built with a little more care. It uses short month names for both ends, and only prints the year on the opening month when the range crosses a year boundary, so a quarter inside one year reads as a compact range rather than repeating the year twice.

Two things about this widget are worth knowing if you plan to extend it. It declares a callback prop and calls it after the standard change handling, but the descriptor never extracts one from the view, so the prop can only arrive from a parent component that renders the field directly. In its core usage nothing does, which makes the hook dead in practice.

And its declared display name contains a spelling mistake, present since the widget was added. That string is what appears in developer tooling listing available widgets, so it is worth recognizing rather than assuming you have found a different widget.

Its placement is also slightly unusual: the file lives in the module that bridges Purchase and Inventory, but the only core usage is in an Inventory dialog. Both modules therefore have to be installed for the widget to resolve, which is normally the case but is worth checking on a stripped-down database.

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 release.

No behavior change. The four rewritten keys, the quarter formatting and the filtering of empty entries are identical. The props move to the new schema syntax, which is where the unused callback prop is redeclared, so it remains present and still unextracted.