Development Book V18: Hide/View Menu Based on Groups

In real-world business applications, not every menu or button should be visible to all users. Odoo provides a built-in way to show or hide UI elements (like menus and buttons) based on user access groups.

Odoo 18 continues to use the groups attribute in XML views (like Odoo 17), but it improves handling group-based visibility especially when using OWL components or JavaScript.

Controlling Button Visibility

If you want to show a button only to a specific group of users (like teachers, managers, etc.), you can use the groups attribute:

<header groups="education_organisation.group_education_organisation_user">
   <button
       name="get_top_score_students"
       string="Get Top Score Students"
       class="oe_highlight"
       type="object"
       groups="education_organisation.group_education_organisation_user"/>
</header>

Here, only users in the group_education_organisation_user will see this button.

Controlling Menu Visibility

To make a menu item visible only to certain user groups, use groups in your definition:

<menuitem
   id="res_config_settings_menu"
   parent="config_menu"
   name="Settings"
   action="education_organisation.res_config_settings_menu_action"
   groups="education_organisation.group_education_organisation_admin,
   education_organisation.group_education_organisation_user"/>

The menu will be visible only to users who belong to either the admin group or the user group of the Education Organisation module, with multiple groups specified by separating them with commas.