In Odoo/OpenERP many times we need to inherit views in order to add/remove/replace few elements of the original view. Simple use of `` can make that easier. With this tag we have to provide an attribute called "position". This attribute contains following values:

• before
• after
• replace
• inside
• attributes

e.g.

<xpath expr="//path-to-element" position="before">
       ....
</xpath>

<xpath expr="//path-to-element" position="after">
      .....
</xpath>

You can use more than one <xpath> in one inherited view. The first four values i.e. before, after, replace and inside are self-explanatory. But there is one special value "attributes". This is used to modify a specific attribute of an element. For e.g. in original view we have a field

<field name="note" readonly="1"/>

In my inherited view I want to change/add some attributes to the above field. It goes like this:

<xpath expr="//form/field[@name='note']" position="attributes">
     <attribute name="readonly">False</attribute>
     <attribute name="string">Description</attribute>
</xpath>

With the above code, field "note" will no longer be readonly and the label of the field will become "Description" on the view.