Customizing how records are searched

The Defining the Model representation and order recipe in Chapter 4,Creating Odoo addon Modules, introduced the name_get() method, which is used to compute a representation of the record in various places, including in the widget used to display Many2one relations in the web client.

This recipe shows us how to allow searching for a book in the Many2one widget by title, author, or ISBN by redefining name_search.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use the following model definition:

class LibraryBook(models.Model): 
    _name = 'library.book' 
    name = fields.Char('Title') 
    isbn = fields.Char('ISBN') 
    author_ids = fields.Many2many('res.partner', 'Authors') 
 
    @api.multi
    def name_get(self): 
        result = [] 
        for book in self: 
        authors = book.author_ids.mapped('name') 
            name = '%s (%s)' % (book.name, ', '.join(authors)) 
            result.append((book.id, name)) 
            return result 

When using this model...