Creating the form view

All views are stored in the database, in the ir.ui.view model. To add a view to a module, we declare a <record> element describing the view in an XML file, which is to be loaded into the database when the module is installed.

Add this new views/todo_view.xml file to define our form view:

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<odoo> 
  <record id="view_form_todo_task" model="ir.ui.view"> 
    <field name="name">To-do Task Form</field> 
    <field name="model">todo.task</field> 
    <field name="arch" type="xml"> 
      <form string="To-do Task"> 
        <group>
          <field name="name"/> 
          <field name="is_done"/> 
          <field name="active" readonly="1"/> 
        </group> 
      </form> 
    </field> 
  </record> 
</odoo> 

The ir.ui.view record has values for three fields: name, model, and arch. Another important element is the record id. It defines an XML ID identifier that can be used for other records to reference it.

The view is for the todo.task model and is named To-do Task Form. The name is just for information; it does not have to be unique, but it should allow one to easily identify which record it refers to. In fact, the name can be entirely omitted; in that case, it will be automatically generated from the model name and the view type.

The most important field is arch, as it contains the view definition, highlighted in the XML code listed previously. The <form> tag defines the view type, and in this case contains three fields. We added the readonly attribute to the active field, to make it read-only in the user interface.

Remember to add this new file to the data key in the manifest file; otherwise, our module won't know about it and it won't be loaded:

'data': [
    'views/todo_menu.xml',
    'views/todo_view.xml',
],