Adding icons to menu items in odoo - odoo

Question

I try to set an icon to menuitem, So I find that the attribute icon is supported, but No change happen when I change its value.
I want to know if it is still supported by menuitem in odoo v7/8. If not, how to add an icon to a menu item?
Edit:
I try to customize the view of the menu in odoo. So I override the template that render the menu in "webClient_templates.xml" from web module like this:
<template id="my_menu_link" inherit_id="web.menu_link">
<span position="replace">
<span class="oe_menu_text">
<i class="fa fa-check"></i>
<t t-esc="menu['name']"/>
</span>
</span>
</template>
Likely, all the menu items will have the same icon (i.e. fa-check) from font-awesome lib.
Now, I try to add a specific icon for each menu item, that I can define it somehow in the xml description of menuitem as a kind of attribute or anything else, and retrieve it like this:
<i t-attrs-class="menu['icon']"></i>
I tried to use icon attribute of menuitem, even if it's deprecated, but menu['icon'] is not recognized in the template level.
Please any suggestions ?

Answer 1

AFAIK displaying icons in menu items is deprecated and does not work on the web client. Probably the to achieve you would need to create a module for the web client extending it with that capability.

Answer 2

I'm using odoo v12 now, and there is also an unused field for icons on ir.ui.menu model.
I managed to show icons on backend's menus, here are the difference with your code:
The icon field is named web_icon, it may be specific to v10+ , I don't have a v8 to verify this.
The templating syntax to set attributes is t-att-<name> and not t-attrs-<name>
And most important: the menus in backend are generated using javascript, so the templates to modify are to find in web/static/src/xml/menu.xml
There are 3 places to add an <i> markup in 2 templates:
<t t-name="Menu.link">
Line 47: <span><i t-att-class="menu.web_icon"></i> <t t-esc="menu.name"/></span>
Line 59: <span><i t-att-class="menu.web_icon"></i> <t t-esc="menu.name"/></span>
<t t-name="Menu.sections">
Line 81: <i t-att-class="second_level_menu.web_icon"></i> <t t-esc="second_level_menu.name"/>
The data to set in menu's icon field is the whole font-awesome CSS classes:
fa fa-check
This is good if you add more icons sets, you won't need to modify again the templates.
But if you want to force the usage of font-awesome, or want to use another icon set like font-awesome solid (using fas class), you can use this markup in templates:
<i t-attf-class="fas fa-#{menu.web_icon}"></i>
(note t-attf-<name> to use "attribute function")
And so the data in the field will be only check...
And finally, the best should be to create a module to inherit the templates and make this modification against modifying it directly as I did...
And also add some more CSS styling to align icon and text correctly (here icons are not the same sized).