Odoo QWeb Templates

Overview

QWeb is Odoo's primary templating engine, used for PDF reports, website pages, and email templates. This skill generates correct, well-structured QWeb XML with proper directives, translation support, and report action bindings.

When to Use This Skill

• Creating a custom PDF report (invoice, delivery slip, certificate).
• Building a QWeb email template triggered by workflow actions.
• Designing Odoo website pages with dynamic content.
• Debugging QWeb rendering errors (t-if, t-foreach issues).

How It Works

1. Activate: Mention @odoo-qweb-templates and describe the report or template needed.
2. Generate: Receive a complete ir.actions.report record and QWeb template.
3. Debug: Paste a broken template to identify and fix rendering issues.

Examples

Example 1: Custom PDF Report

<!-- Report Action -->
<record id="action_report_patient_card" model="ir.actions.report">
    <field name="name">Patient Card</field>
    <field name="model">hospital.patient</field>
    <field name="report_type">qweb-pdf</field>
    <field name="report_name">hospital_management.report_patient_card</field>
    <field name="binding_model_id" ref="model_hospital_patient"/>
</record>

<!-- QWeb Template -->
<template id="report_patient_card">
    <t t-call="web.html_container">
        <t t-foreach="docs" t-as="doc">
            <t t-call="web.external_layout">
                <div class="page">
                    <h2>Patient Card</h2>
                    <table class="table table-bordered">
                        <tr>
                            <td><strong>Name:</strong></td>
                            <td><t t-field="doc.name"/></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <td><strong>Doctor:</strong></td>
                            <td><t t-field="doc.doctor_id.name"/></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <td><strong>Status:</strong></td>
                            <td><t t-field="doc.state"/></td>
                        </tr>
                    </table>
                </div>
            </t>
        </t>
    </t>
</template>

Example 2: Conditional Rendering

<!-- Show a warning block only if the patient is not confirmed -->
<t t-if="doc.state == 'draft'">
    <div class="alert alert-warning">
        <strong>Warning:</strong> This patient has not been confirmed yet.
    </div>
</t>

Best Practices

• ✅ Do: Use t-field for model fields — Odoo auto-formats dates, monetary values, and booleans correctly.
• ✅ Do: Use t-out (Odoo 15+) for safe HTML output of non-field strings. Use t-esc only on Odoo 14 and below (it HTML-escapes output).
• ✅ Do: Call web.external_layout for PDF reports to automatically include the company header, footer, and logo.
• ✅ Do: Use _lt() (lazy translation) for translatable string literals inside Python report helpers, not inline t-esc.
• ❌ Don't: Use raw Python expressions inside QWeb — compute values in the model or a report _get_report_values() helper.
• ❌ Don't: Forget t-as when using t-foreach; without it, you can't access the current record in the loop body.
• ❌ Don't: Use t-esc where you intend to render HTML content — it will escape the tags and print them as raw text.

Limitations

• Does not cover website controller routing for dynamic QWeb pages — that requires Python http.route knowledge.
• Email template QWeb has different variable scope than report QWeb (object vs docs) — this skill primarily focuses on PDF reports.
• QWeb JavaScript (used in Kanban/Form widgets) is a different engine; this skill covers server-side QWeb only.
• Does not cover wkhtmltopdf configuration for PDF rendering issues (page size, margins, header/footer overlap).