Android: Show options menu in navigation drawer - android

I have a menu defined in an XML file such a "home_menu.xml" like this:
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<!-- Should always be in the overflow -->
<item
android:id="#+id/action_settings"
android:showAsAction="never"
android:title="#string/action_settings"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/action_user_preferences"
android:showAsAction="never"
android:title="#string/action_user_preferences"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/action_logout"
android:showAsAction="never"
android:title="#string/action_logout"/>
</menu>
In my "Home" activity, I can access this menu by pushing the menu button in a device that has a physical button, but I don't want to use action bar so I want to add a Navigation Drawer for this purpose as Google Maps does.
It would be great if I could use the same onOptionsItemSelected() method defined in my Home activity to handle menu actions.

You won't be able to do that.
You'll have to do it manually.
Or semi-manually. You could in onCreateOptionsMenu get all the menu items with title, icon and id and generate the view (listview for instance) for the drawer.
And use a shared method to handle the click that takes the id in parameter.
But if you want to hide/show some elements in the menu, you'll have to update your listview manually since onCreateOptionsMenu won't be called. And if you have multiple fragment with menus you'll also have to do something.
So I would recommend to use the drawer even when there is a hardware menu key.

Related

Creating a popup options menu in a contextual action bar

I have an app with a NoActionBar theme. In my main activity I have an options menu that I created manually on the top of the screen (or by utilizing the built in device's options button).
In this main activity, I have a fragment with a listView where I apply the action mode long click functionality, to show the contextual action bar (CAB) for further user options.
Now, I try adding an options item to my CAB so it will contain some options like selecting all items in the listView, but since it's an item of the CAB, I can't really show the popup menu like in a regular activity. Further more, I want all the options menu callbacks (such as onOptionsItemSelected) to stay in the context of the CAB, in order to be able to continue to perform actions on the CAB.
Here's the code of my CAB:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">
<item
android:id="#+id/action_delete"
android:orderInCategory="100"
app:showAsAction="always"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_delete"
android:title="Delete"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/action_overflow"
app:showAsAction="always"
android:orderInCategory="200"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_overflow"
android:title="Options"
android:visible="false"/>
</menu>
Apparently I missed the built in feature of the CAB - a built in overflow menu that collapses some of the actions' items once the screen is too small to show them all.
Another manipulation that needs to be done in order to always collapse certain actions under that overflow menu is to set for each one of them:
android:showAsAction="never"
app:showAsAction="never"
So, say we have 3 actions (delete, selece_all, add) in the CAB, and we want two of them (select_all, add) to be collapsed always under the built in overflow menu, we'll set this in the CAB's xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:mm="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">
<item
android:id="#+id/action_delete"
android:orderInCategory="100"
mm:showAsAction="always"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_delete"
android:title="Delete"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/action_select"
android:orderInCategory="200"
android:showAsAction="never"
mm:showAsAction="never"
android:title="#string/select_all"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/action_add"
android:orderInCategory="300"
android:showAsAction="never"
mm:showAsAction="never"
android:title="#string/button_add"/>

Missing Action Bar icons in a tabbed PageView

I'm writing an Android app based on a MainActivity with several attached Fragments. The ActionBar displays navigation tabs, along with icons. Each fragment has a set of icons associated with it; MainActivity has a 'Close' icon which is also displayed. I display them by calling setHasOptionsMenu(true), and inflating the menu xml in onCreateOptionsMenu.
Menu XML example:
<item
android:id="#+id/apply"
android:orderInCategory="50"
android:title="#string/apply"
app:showAsAction="always"
android:showAsAction="always"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/reset"
android:orderInCategory="75"
android:title="#string/reset"
app:showAsAction="always"
android:showAsAction="always"/>
</menu>
Right now, sometimes the icons display correctly, and other times the action bar appears to be missing icons. The missing icons don't appear in the overflow (I have a physical menu button) either. I've tried hiding all menus except the one belonging to the active fragment in PageView.setOnPageChangeListener, but that hasn't helped.
Thanks!
Remove app:showAsAction=... attributes and delete the app namespace from the menu xml file.

Hide, unhide ActionBar icons with Search Widget

A common pattern I see in many apps that provide some search functionality is to have the search widget clear the other menu icons off of the ActionBar. This works for me right now just by using ifRoom for showAsAction in my menu items. I'd like to show more menu items in the actionbar though, because it seems that the ActionBar is very conservative with how it determines ifRoom and consequently at least one important menu item is pushed to the overflow (perhaps someone smarter than me knows why they do that).
So how can I set showAsAction as always while still clearing the menu items off of the ActionBar when the Search Widget is activated? When I try that now, the menu items don't move, and the search widget is condensed.
Here's my menu:
<item
android:id="#+id/action_search"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_search"
android:title="#string/action_search"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView|always"
android:actionViewClass="android.widget.SearchView" />
<item
android:id="#+id/action_stores"
android:title="#string/action_stores"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_stores"
android:showAsAction="always" />
<item
android:id="#+id/action_shopping_lists"
android:title="#string/action_shopping_lists"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_lists"
android:showAsAction="always" />
<item
android:id="#+id/action_preferences"
android:orderInCategory="100"
android:title="#string/action_settings"
app:showAsAction="never"/>
My searchable.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<searchable xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:label="#string/app_name"
android:hint="#string/search_hint" >
</searchable>
Couldn't you set an onClickListener on the search widget that then runs some few lines of code to make the other MenuItems change from 'always' to 'ifRoom'?
The few lines of code within the onClickListener would contain something like this:
myMenuItem.setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_IF_ROOM);
whereas myMenuItem is your MenuItem that should go from 'always' to 'ifRoom'.
You can change it back later in an appropriate method.

Should my Activity have menu as well as Action bar icons?

I am developing an application of my own and was reading this: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/menus.html
It says:
Beginning with Android 3.0, the Menu button is deprecated (some
devices don't have one), so you should migrate toward using the action
bar to provide access to actions and other options.
My app is only targeting android 4.2+. Does that mean I should present the menu options as only action bar icons ? What if there is not enough room available ?
Items that do not fit in the action bar will automatically be relegated to the overflow menu. All you have to do is set the android:showAsAction="ifRoom" property in your xml for the menu item.
This basically tells the system that this menu item should be displayed as an action icon if there is room available. If not, it should be shown as an overflow menu item.
It means that there is no more hardware Menu Button. Your menu items will be showed in popup under "three-doted icon". In menu.xml you can configure everything:
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
tools:context=".MainActivity">
<item
android:id="#+id/action_example"
android:title="#string/action_example"
android:showAsAction="ifRoom" /> <!-- attention -->
<item
android:id="#+id/action_settings"
android:title="#string/action_settings"
android:orderInCategory="100"
android:showAsAction="never" />
</menu>
Read more here
If you need a lot of icons to be showed you can split ActionBar(second(bottom) menu bar will appear).
documantation of splitting
I hope mine explanation will be good enough:)

ActionBarSherlock collapseActionView

I'm having a problem when I try to set one item in my actionbar as always visible and 4 more icons as dropdown items with the following layout:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<item
android:id="#+id/search_movies"
android:icon="#drawable/action_search"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="Search"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/movies"
android:icon="#drawable/action_video"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Movies"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/theaters"
android:icon="#drawable/action_location_map"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Theaters"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/preferences"
android:icon="#drawable/action_settings"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Preferences"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/contact"
android:icon="#drawable/action_about"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Contact"/>
</menu>
The result is just the first item showing and the rest are not visible, not even as a dropdown. This is using ActionBarSherlock and a 2.3 Android device.
The question is, how can I get the icons to follow this layout:
EDIT:
The problem I had was because when you are using the actionbar with a device that has a "menu" hardware button the 3-dot dropdown does not shows off, the 4 other items are only displayed if you press the menu hardware button. Does anyone knows if this behaviour can be modified?
Hmmm, maybe I misunderstood, but if you wish to places those remaining four items into the overflow action menu (the 3-dot icon) then using android:showAsAction="never" instead of "collapseActionView" should do it.
...Tried a couple ways, but this did the trick:
Force overflow menu in ABS
I've met the same problem and my solution is quite simple. (I didn't use HoloEverywhere.)
The idea comes from the ABS sample project, whose drop-down menu can be displayed on pre-4.0 devices as well by using a submenu. So, my idea is using a submenu to disguise the 3-dot icon. Here's the code:
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
SubMenu sub = menu.addSubMenu("More");
sub.getItem().setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_ALWAYS);
sub.getItem().setIcon(R.drawable.ic_menu);
getSupportMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.activity_main, sub);
return true;
}
Since the "More" menu doesn't have a MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_WITH_TEXT attribute, so the word "More"(or whatever you named) will actually not be displayed on the action bar. The only displayed icon R.drawable.ic_menu can be copied from ABS source code res/drawable-xxdpi folders named "abs__ic_menu_moreoverflow_normal_holo_dark.png", which is the so-called 3-dot icon. And the R.menu.activity_main is your menu xml.
It works!

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