I am using the Tabbed Activity (that includes swipes and tabs) and when I was looking at the generated code, noticed that "ActionBarActivity" is deprecated. So I went online android docs and show that I should use "AppCompatActivity" insted, I changed the extending class from ActionBarActivity to AppCompatActivity and there was no problem. However, there is another deprecated interface and that is ActionBar.TabListener. What should I use instead of this interface ?
Switch to toolbar much easier to work with you can use pagerslidingtabstrip and link it with your viewpager.
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There are two principal ways of creating an app bar for an activity in API 21+ using the Toolbar.
Create an activity which extends AppCompatActivity and then follow the instructions here
Create a standalone Toolbarwhich acts as an app bar (define the Toolbar in xml using android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar) and then inflate a menu into it like this: ` toolbar.inflateMenu(R.menu.homeview_menu_common);
My question is: what are the benefits and drawbacks of doing one over the other?`
A related question to this topic can also be found here (How can an activity use a Toolbar without extending AppCompatActivity)
Short answer: No you should make your activity extend AppCompatActivty
You can create a toolbar without AppCompatActivty but besides an app bar the AppCompat also brings with it the support libraries that allow you to add material design to your app going as far back as API level 7 of Android.
Unless there is a specific reason for not using AppCompat all your Activites should extend AppCompatActivty to model a Material app.
You need to use an AppCompatActivity extended Activity because, when you set up the Toolbar as the ActionBar with setSupportActionBar(Toolbar) you get the ability to reference it through Context.getSupportActionBar() from nearly anywhere in your code i.e Fragment. But, if you don't extend AppCompatActivity you can't easily get a reference to the Toolbar from anywhere else other than the Activity in which it was defined.
Say someone wants an Activity which both has an action bar and a preference, the first idea in mind is probably
public class MyActivity extends ActionBarActivity, PreferenceActivity
But Java doesn't allow this. I know API 11+ Activities has actionbar builtin. It's just an example of wondering how to use multiple features from multiple base classes.
EDIT: Based on the feedback it seems we have to hack in this case. IMHO it could be as simple as putting all activity utilities as fields in class Activity and implement getter/setter to use those utilities. Well, in reality, it isn't.
No you cannot extend from two classes in Java. Typically in Android to add the ActionBar to the older PreferenceActivity there are a couple of hacks you can do or libraries that also do the same thing. However, recently with the new AppCompat library they introduced the Toolbar widget which can be used to add an Actionbar to your PreferenceActivity in this case. For more information, checkout this post I recently wrote on how to add a Toolbar to your legacy SettingsActivity.
simple solution:
Firstly you can't extend multiple classes..java does not support multiple inheritance see here
Secondly using action bar sherlock library here, this gives you action bar functionality without extending the actionbaractivity plus its backwards compatiable.
Or...you can implement a custom action bar go here
As mentioned in the other answers, Java doesn't allow multiple inheritance.
If you want an ActionBar as well as something such as Preference functionality, consider using a PreferenceFragment
It's not quite the same as multiple inheritance but Fragments allow adding extra functionality to Activities.
You can create a subclass of the PreferenceActivity, called AppCompatPreferenceActivity (or whatever you would like), to use an AppCompatDelegate to provide the SupportActionBar functionality. You can then subclass the new AppCompatPreferenceActivity for your MyActivity class like so:
public class MyActivity extends AppCompatPreferenceActivity
For how to do this, check out the AppCompatPreferenceActivity sample code from the Chromium project.
I found on many blogs and tutorials links, where clearily written to support AppCompat Library we should use ActionBarActivity to extend Class instead of normal Activity.
So its clear to me, but i have few doubts in my mind regarding extending ActionBarActivity.
Questions are:
what if my class extends Fragment (is there i need to extends ActionBarActivity) while using AppCompat Library?
what if my class extends ListActivity (is there i need to extends ActionBarActivity) while using AppCompat Library (if 'yes' so how ?)
1) ActionBarActivity extends FragmentActivity so you can use fragments with it
2) Instead of using ListActivity you have to add a ListFragment to your ActionBarActivity (or FragmentActivity). You can add it to android.R.id.content so it occupies the whole screen.
I want to use Fragments in my application, but I cannot extend FragmentActivity because my application already extends an activity that is part of a library. Since this means that I cannot call getSupportFragmentManager(), I am looking for a workaround that would allow me to use Fragments without having to extend FragmentActivity. Is it possible?
Your library is going to need to extend the FragmentActivity.
I would be concerned about a library that requires you to use their base activities anyway.
As mentioned (where possible) grab the library source code and add it as a library project to eclipse and make its activities extend the FragmentActivity class.
I have created a tab fragments in android 2.2 , with a android compatibility support library , now in my application i have few activities some of them are extends Activity class and some of them extends ListActivity.
so how can i convert the existing Activity or ListActivity into Fragments so that i can take the advantage of Fragment features ?
As to create a fragment , one has to extends Fragment class but if an activity is deriving ListActivity then what to do to convert it in a fragment?
You need to review the Fragment documentation and samples on the Android Developers website. This will explain what a Fragment is able to do, and what you should be doing inside of your fragment.
In essence, its a very simple transition over to using Fragments once you have looked over the examples. You will need an Activity to contain the Fragments still.
To make this a lot simpler, I would advise you look into the ActionBarSherlock library, which will allow you to use the ActionBar and SupportLibrary back to 2.1.
To get you started, you will want to use the Fragment and ListFragment classes, which will be very similar to a standard activity, but the life cycles are a little different with a few naming changes.
You could try deriving it from ListFragment