What is the difference between Action Bar and newly introduced Toolbar? - android

After Google introduced Material Design, I have heard about a new widget class called Toolbar.
What is the Toolbar, and what is the exact difference between ActionBar and ToolBar?

I found a good explanation from Android Developers Blog post.
In this release, Android introduces a new Toolbar widget. This is a generalization of the Action Bar pattern that gives you much more control and flexibility. Toolbar is a view in your hierarchy just like any other, making it easier to interleave with the rest of your views, animate it, and react to scroll events. You can also set it as your Activity’s action bar, meaning that your standard options menu actions will be display within it.
Yes, we, Android developers, needed more control over ActionBar, right? And Toolbar is just for it.
In other words, the ActionBar now became a special kind of Toolbar. This is an excerpt from Google's official Material Design spec document.
The app bar, formerly known as the action bar in Android, is a special kind of toolbar that’s used for branding, navigation, search, and actions.
More details like how to use Toolbar as an ActionBar are included in above blog post.

Related

What is the purpose of setSupportActionBar? What does it do?

If there is a toolbar, it is usually passed into setSupportActionBar(). Why?
As per docs
A Toolbar is a generalization of action bars for use within application layouts. While an action bar is traditionally part of an Activity's opaque window decor controlled by the framework, a Toolbar may be placed at any arbitrary level of nesting within a view hierarchy. An application may choose to designate a Toolbar as the action bar for an Activity using the setActionBar() method.
But in simple ways, this is a way of telling the Activity that you are interested in using the features related to Toolbar. It will delegate the functionalities related to your defined toolbar. It helps activity to understand the many of the requirements some of them mentioned below.
1) Setting menu options
2) Setting Navigation drawer
3) Setting common Toolbar
4) Setting back button on the top left
5) Using an icon for brand identification
6) Setting a common title or subtitle
7) And many more
If you don't mention for these functionalities by telling the activity using setSupportActionBar then you have to create all this by your self and support them back to the older version. With Toolbar it comes free and you have to just tell a activity to use it will take of supporting different functionalities itself.
if you want to apply your custom toolbar instead of default toolbar then to set toolbar into that specific screen/activity you must be use setSupportActionBar() along with your toolbar. ;)

Mixing bottom app bar and floating action button (FAB)

I want to use BottomNavigation and FloatingActionButton at the same time in Android and there is nothing like this in google material components and also I didn't find any third party library which implements something like this. Attached GIF demonstrate what I want to implement. In fact I want a bottom navigation that one of its tabs has a FAB which placed on the navigation bar and the FAB disappears when another tab is selected.
See the attached image here.
You won't find a Material component for the layout in your example since it's counter to the Material Design Spec.
Floating Action Button (FAB) represents the primary action of a screen
The example would provide multiple "primary" interactions since its mixed with navigation. I would not recommend using the FAB in the context of a bottom navigation bar. Instead, separate them visually for the user's benefit by moving the FAB up and to the right of the page. Here are the Material Docs for Extending the FAB
Now you don't have to follow the Material Spec BUT you shouldn't expect pre-built Material components to ignore it.

what is exact difference between appbar, toolbar, actionbar ? and when to use them specifically?

what is exact difference between appbar, Toolbar, Actionbar? and when to use them specifically?
I try to find about them but it make me confuse so can any buddy explain to me what is exact difference between them and when to use them or are this are the same name of the single component?
Toolbar
A standard toolbar for use within application content.
A Toolbar is a generalization of action bars for use within application layouts. While an action bar is traditionally part of an Activity's opaque window decor controlled by the framework, a Toolbar may be placed at any arbitrary level of nesting within a view hierarchy. An application may choose to designate a Toolbar as the action bar for an Activity using the setActionBar() method.
Toolbar supports a more focused feature set than ActionBar. From start to end, a toolbar may contain a combination of the following optional elements:
A navigation button. This may be an Up arrow, navigation menu toggle, close, collapse, done or another glyph of the app's choosing. This button should always be used to access other navigational destinations within the container of the Toolbar and its signified content or otherwise leave the current context signified by the Toolbar. The navigation button is vertically aligned within the Toolbar's minimum height, if set.
A branded logo image. This may extend to the height of the bar and can be arbitrarily wide.
A title and subtitle. The title should be a signpost for the Toolbar's current position in the navigation hierarchy and the content contained there. The subtitle, if present should indicate any extended information about the current content. If an app uses a logo image it should strongly consider omitting a title and subtitle.
One or more custom views. The application may add arbitrary child views to the Toolbar. They will appear at this position within the layout. If a child view's Toolbar.LayoutParams indicates a Gravity value of CENTER_HORIZONTAL the view will attempt to center within the available space remaining in the Toolbar after all other elements have been measured.
An action menu. The menu of actions will pin to the end of the Toolbar offering a few frequent, important or typical actions along with an optional overflow menu for additional actions. Action buttons are vertically aligned within the Toolbar's minimum height, if set.
2.Actionbar
The action bar is a dedicated piece of real estate at the top of each screen that is generally persistent throughout the app.
It provides several key functions:
Makes important actions prominent and accessible in a predictable way (such as New or Search).
Supports consistent navigation and view switching within apps.
Reduces clutter by providing an action overflow for rarely used actions.
Provides a dedicated space for giving your app an identity.
3.Appbar
The app bar, also known as the action bar, is one of the most important design elements in your app's activities, because it provides a visual structure and interactive elements that are familiar to users. Using the app bar makes your app consistent with other Android apps, allowing users to quickly understand how to operate your app and have a great experience. The key functions of the app bar are as follows:
A dedicated space for giving your app an identity and indicating the user's location in the app.
Access to important actions in a predictable way, such as search.
Support for navigation and view switching (with tabs or drop-down lists).
EDIT
An Action bar is traditionally a part of an Activity opaque window decor controlled by the framework but a Toolbar may be placed at any level of nesting within a view hierarchy. The toolbar provides more feature than ActionBar. A Toolbar may contain a combination of elements from start to end.
Important Note:
Toolbar’s are more flexible than ActionBar. We can easily modify its color, size and position. We can also add labels, logos, navigation icons and other views in it. In Material Design Android has updated the AppCompat support libraries so that we can use Toolbar’s in our devices running API Level 7 and up...
App bar is rather a component name from the design while Toolbar and ActionBar classes are about the implementation. So the question is - what is the difference between Toolbar and ActionBar.
In short, ActionBar is an initial realization of the app bar component and it's bound to Activity. Initially it wasn't even a part of the Activity layout but rather a decoration that's rendered by the system.
Later on Toolbar was introduced, unlike ActionBar, Toolbar isn't bound to Activity, you can place it wherever you want inside your layout and it has a clearer API. To make the adoption of the Toolbar easier, there's setSupportActionBar() method in AppCompatActivity class, so you can use a Toolbar via ActionBar API, and it's where a lot of confusion comes from.
So, which class should you use in a modern Android app? There's no doubts - Toolbar, or its more advanced version from MDC library - MaterialToolbar. But as I mentioned above, a Toolbar can be used as a standalone solution and can also be set as an Activity action bar using setSupportActionBar() method. Take a look at this question Is setSupportActionbar required anymore? and the answer to find more details.
I would say they all are the same container view on the upper end of the application's screen... Toolbar is the name of the Java class defining the features of this box, but on the Android Developers site they're calling it App Bar. As I know, it is an enhanced action bar which was mainly used before Material Design.
EDIT #1: By the way, I suggest to use the App Bar tutorial when creating an application because it is the recommended way to do it.

Toolbar as self-managed ActionBar vs Toolbar as framework managed ActionBar

Alright, I am trying to understand what I would lose if I use Toolbar as a self-managed ActionBar and not use setSupportActionBar.
AFAIK, all that ActionBar does is, provide placeholders for logo, navigation and menu items and also let Fragments add/customize the menu items.
The same functionality could be achieved using Toolbar.setLogo(), Toolbar.setNavigationIcon(), Toolbar.setNavigationOnClickListener() and Toolbar.inflateMenu() apis. Of course, directing the menu handling logic to Fragments might be lost but I think that is not that big of deal if the Activity knows which Fragment is on top and changes the menu items accordingly.
I am trying to make sure :
If I can achieve every ActionBar capability just by using Toolbar and MenuItems (and not using setSupportActionBar()).
Is it ok to not have an exhaustive knowledge of ActionBar apis. Some of the ActionBar apis are very confusing. Using setHomeAsUp api to show hamburger icon, back icon etc., doesn't feel right. If someone starts learning android today, do they even need to understand the framework's ActionBar apis?
Update : In the article Android Design Support Library under section CoordinatorLayout and the app bar, I learnt that the new paradigm app bar is a replacement for the action bar paradigm. I think action bar will soon be deprecated and we should get used to the new app bar paradigm which covers the new material design user experiences.
Yes you can use achieve similar capabilities of ActionBar in Toolbar.
Mainly the difference lies is Toolbar becomes part of View so we can much more fun playing with them to get Scrolling Techniques
You can use Toolbar separately as View & perform ActionBar alike functionalities. For example, in one of my app I use 2 Toolbar one which is set to setSupportActionBar() while other is just used for some other functionalities.
Conclusion: Well it depends upon your requirements if you want to use Toolbar as self or framework. None the less you can use it as both.
I hope this answers your question well.
To me you are right.
From AppCompatDelegate source code, method setSupportActionBar(),
When set to a non-null value the getSupportActionBar() method will return
an ActionBar object that can be used to control the given toolbar as if it were
a traditional window decor action bar. The toolbar's menu will be populated with the
Activity's options menu and the navigation button will be wired through the standard
android.R.id.home menu select action.
So these are most, if not all, the benefits you will have. As you said, it is easy to implement navigation and menu inflating through Toolbar APIs. However, I don't see what you would gain by not calling setSupportActionBar().
YES YES YES
using setSupportToolBar() is the same old Actionbar the only reason ToolBar is ToolBar is for versatility,same as Fragments is to Views, all lies on how you implement stuff, and also the old Actionbar is kinda boring and much restricted as to Toolbar

Customized navigation menu in Android

I'd like to create a navigation menu in my Android app: a bar always at the bottom of the screen, with 4 choices Home|Categories|Search|Favorites, and the current page highlighted.
It seems the options menu can hardly be customized, so I can't use it.
Do I have to add this navigation bar in every layout or is there any better solutions?
Thanks
Julien
It sounds like you're replicating an iPhone interface. As most Android phones have buttons along the bottom of the screen (Home, Back, etc) it's likely to be a bad idea to put navigation there as it's easy to hit the wrong one.
The Google-recommended approach is to use the Action Bar pattern, across the top of the screen, which is very clear, and means your app is consistent with others (look at Twitter, Google Maps, Facebook - they all use the action bar pattern).
From Honeycomb (v3.0) onwards:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/ActionBar.html
A simple library to create an Action Bar on any version of Android
https://github.com/johannilsson/android-actionbar
To create an action bar that uses that library on versions earlier than 3.0, but uses the official implemention for v3.0+, try this:
https://github.com/JakeWharton/ActionBarSherlock
The action bar is highly customisable, but remember that a key to a nice user interface is consistency across the platform, i.e. your app consistent with other apps and the OS.
If you need a navigation with more items or items within a specific page, you can use TabLayout, but for your primary nav, use the action bar, that's what it's for.
Use the TabLayout

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