Hi Everyone --

I'm working on porting my Odoo 17 EE (odoo.sh) site to Odoo 18. There was a change to how the product widget works in this version.

Previously, you select a product in one column, its name is populated in the description column along with extra description values if present. This allowed you to change all of the text that is printed for that line on a sale order PDF.

Now, you can only edit the description that is populated on the sale order line.

We have several "Generic Products" such as Part, Service, Rental, etc. for one-off items where we changed the text to be whatever we wanted. Some of the items we quote are highly customized and it isn't feasible to create a new product for each situation.

With the new widget, we can't change the name of the product, so each line where we use one of these generic products now shows e.g.:

[Part] Part

Our custom text here

I'm wondering if anyone else has this issue, and how they solved it? Some ideas I have played around with:

1. Change the widget back to the old one.

This could work, but it seems the new "Combo" feature in V18 depends on this new widget, so this isn't ideal if we ever want to use that feature. I also like how compact the new widget is.

2. Customize the widget

Customize the widget to maybe add another line for editing the product name as well as the description. This would be ideal, but I haven't played around with front-end code too much in Odoo. Not sure how difficult this would be to achieve and maintain.