How to add custom search on many2one fields in odoo18 (namesearch in odoo18)

Upgrading from Odoo 17 to 18 gave me a fresh challenge 🤔: many2one field searches weren't working as they used to. I was confident everything was fine, until a client call pointed out that the search results were off. At first, I tried to tweak the search like I did in Odoo 17, but soon discovered that Odoo 18 has a new approach. It took me two days to figure out the right solution, and now I'm sharing it here to help keep your Odoo development burnout free.

Quick Fix with Static Search

For many cases, a static search is enough. You simply add a list called _rec_names_search to your model with the fields you want to include in the search. The order of the fields determines their priority which will be used for the search, below example illustrates it.

class ItProducts(models.Model):
    _name = "it.products"
    _rec_names_search = ['name', 'supplier', 'supplier.email','serial_no']

More Flexibility with Dynamic Search

If you need to adjust the search behaviour based on certain conditions (like user groups or department-specific criteria..etc ), you can override the _search_display_name method. This method lets you define a custom search domain. Take following as a start template to tweak your function:

@api.model
def _search_display_name(self, operator, value):
    operator='ilike'
    name = value or ''
    domain = ['|', '|', '|', ('name', operator, name),
              ('supplier', operator, name),
              ('supplier.email', operator, name),
              ('serial_no', operator, name),
              ]
    return domain

For example, I once had a client who needed a conditional search based on user rights at a departmental level. They were searching for IT products, and the Accounts team wanted to search by supplier name and email, while the IT team wanted to search by name and serial number. Hence, a dynamic search was the ideal solution.

Here’s the solution I used.

@api.model
def _search_display_name(self, operator, value):
    operator = 'ilike'
    accounts_team = self.env.ref('it_products.accounts_team')
    name = value or ''
    user = self.env.user
    if accounts_team and accounts_team in user.groups_id:
        domain = ['|', '|', ('supplier.name', operator, name), ('supplier.email', operator, name),('name', operator, name)]
    else:
        domain = ['|', ('name', operator, name), ('serial_no', operator, name)]
    return domain

This approach gave me the flexibility to fine-tune the search functionality in Odoo 18, ensuring it met the unique needs of different teams.

Hopefully, this will help you achieve name_search for many2one fields in Odoo 18. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to start a conversation in the section below—I’m just a message away. 😃 Until next time, happy coding without burnout!