[19] Question: migration of impersonate_login to Odoo 19

[heyagent]

Hello OCA team,

We’re migrating to Odoo 19 and have adapted impersonate_login accordingly. In 18.0 the addon worked fine; in 19.0 we hit a few API changes and addressed them locally.

Root cause observed

• Odoo 19 dropped the extra raise_on_email kwarg on mail.thread._message_compute_author.
• The lowercased fields.datetime.now() alias is gone; only fields.Datetime.now() remains.
• Session custom keys in 19 must be accessed via the mapping API (e.g., request.session["my_key"] / request.session.get("my_key")), not as attributes.
• On res.groups XML, the relation field is user_ids (not users).

Working approach we implemented locally

• Updated mail.thread override signature to def _message_compute_author(self, author_id=None, email_from=None) and adjusted the super() call.
• Replaced fields.datetime.now() with fields.Datetime.now().
• Switched all usage of request.session.impersonate_from_uid and similar to mapping-style reads/writes: request.session.get("impersonate_from_uid") and request.session["impersonate_from_uid"] = ....
• Fixed security/group.xml to use <field name="user_ids" .../>.
• Kept the impersonation flow identical (swap request.session.uid, recompute session_token via odoo.service.security.compute_session_token, and client reload). This still works in 19.
• UI: since we return an action object directly from RPC (not via /web/action/load), we wrap the help string with Owl’s markup() in the client so that any HTML help renders like standard actions in 19. We also provide a styled empty-list helper (smiling face + paragraph) for the Switch Login selector.

Key details

• The server-side session change and session_token recomputation is unchanged and remains necessary in 19.
• Extending ir.http.session_info() to expose is_impersonate_user and impersonate_from_uid remains the correct pattern.
• Authorship: overrides ensuring chatter clarity and create_uid/write_uid attribution to the original user during impersonation continue to work in 19 once session keys use the mapping API.

Questions

1. Can you confirm these changes align with Odoo 19 best practices for this addon?
2. Could you please create/confirm a 19.0 branch for server-auth so we can open a PR for impersonate_login? I currently don’t see a 19.0 branch to target.

Testing

• Installed on a fresh 19.0 DB with --stop-after-init, verified:
  • Switch/Back menu entries visibility
  • Session switching + token recompute + client reload
  • Chatter shows “Logged in as …” during impersonation
  • create_uid / write_uid attribution preserved (original impersonating user)
  • Logs recorded under Settings → Technical → Impersonated Logs

Happy to push the patch and a concise README note for 19.0 once the target branch is available.

Thanks!

— Milan Topuzov