Develop Reference

Is there any way to find google cast devices if your app isn't using an AppCompat derived theme?

I recently started working on an nearly completed android app, and was tasked with adding chromecast integration. The problem I'm running into is that I can't figure out how to get the MediaRouteActionProvider from my menu item because the app isn't based off an AppCompat derived theme (IIRC, it's mostly Holo).
For instance, in all of the example apps I've looked at, there is some code like this:
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
getMenuInflator().inflate(R.menu.main_menu, menu);
MenuItem caster = menu.findItem(R.id.chromecast_menu_item);
MediaRouteActionProvider actionProvider = (MediaRouteActionProvider) MenuItemCompat.getActionProvider(caster);
actionProvider.setRouteSelected(routeSelector);
return true;
}
But the actionProvider decleration returns null for an app that isn't AppCompat based.
Are there any other options for getting chromecast devices on the network?

How can I implement actionbar to api level 8 easily?

I search on google and stackoverflow this topic.I ve found a few way to implement.
one of these is actionbarsherlock , but actually I do not understand how can implement this to my project. Is there any simple way? I mean a few classes or just add a library I do not know but I have a huge project and I want to implement this .Could you show me how can do it easily?
thanks

If you want to use ActionbarCompat library.
1) Import the ActionbarCompat library project into your workspace first and add the library to your project
https://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/setup.html#libs-with-res
2) Extend your Activity Class with ActionBarActivity
3) set your theme in manifest as
android:theme="#style/Theme.AppCompat"

Please check this link.
You can use android support library for this. No need of any other library.
Example also there in side link.

If You want to use ActionBar that supports devices with lower api..
you can do two things ...
1)Use the support Library(ActionbarCompat)
2)Use ActionBarSherlock
I use ActionBarsherlock
Steps to Use
1)YOURACTIVITY extends SherlockActivity
2) Use onCreateOptionsMenu to get the menu
`
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
// Inflate the menu; this adds items to the action bar if it is present.
SubMenu subMenu1 = menu.addSubMenu("");
subMenu1.add(0,2,Menu.NONE,"Rate Us").setIcon(R.drawable.ic_action_good);
MenuItem subMenu1Item = subMenu1.getItem();
subMenu1Item.setIcon(R.drawable.ic_action_overflow);
subMenu1Item.setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_ALWAYS | MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_WITH_TEXT);
return super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
}
3) Use onOptionsItemSelected to get the item selected
#Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
switch (item.getItemId()) {
case 2:
//rate app
break;
return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
}
4)Finally in your AndroidManifest File, add this under your activity
android:theme="#style/Theme.Sherlock"
`
5) and you are Done ...:)

For setup support library see-
https://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/setup.html
And for implementing action bar using support library see this-
http://antonioleiva.com/actionbarcompat-how-to-use/

How to add actions to Overflow menu on Galaxy S3?

I'm facing a problem when actions intended to be shown in overflow menu in action bar are not there on Galaxy S3. As a consequence the UX is somewhat confusing - my action bar on Galaxy S3 is there to only display app logo and name but offering no extra functionality.
I'd like to have an identical UX on all devices running on Android 4.x with actions in the overflow menu. Is this possible without using third-party components such as ActionBarSherlock?
Thanls

This is a decision made by some manufacturers that requires some "bad" solutions if you really want to do this. The overflow menu is just the "regular" old menu button that all android devices used to have. When the menu button got removed by Google in Honeycomb and ICS some manufacturers decided to keep the menu button. This has lead to great confusion about what the menu button is and does.
You should keep in mind though that the user using a S3 would expect to have a functional menu button as they would not be used to seeing a 3-dot menu. All apps using the built in menu system should appear in a way to the user that they expect. Therefor I would strongly recommend against the urge to have your app look exactly the same on all devices in this matter since it would most likely confuse users more then help them. It should be possible, to both implement the "proper" menu system and a "custom/fake" 3-dot menu if you wish however.
This post seems to have some good guidelines:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/10713860/1068167

There is a quick and dirty way to fake the absence of a hardware menu button using reflection to set a field in your app's ViewConfiguration instance.
The following code snip can be added to your activity and called during onCreate().
private void enableActionBarOverflow() {
try {
ViewConfiguration config = ViewConfiguration.get(this);
Field menuKeyField = ViewConfiguration.class
.getDeclaredField("sHasPermanentMenuKey");
if(menuKeyField != null) {
menuKeyField.setAccessible(true);
menuKeyField.setBoolean(config, false);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Not a clean solution as the implementation of ViewConfiguration could change at some point in the future, and since the sHasPermanentMenuKey field is private, there's no guarantee that the field will always be there.
However, I would only use this as a last resort if you absolutely must have an overflow menu on devices that have a menu key.
Assuming you're minimum API is 11 (Honeycomb) or greater, a better solution would be to make your own overflow menu like so:
Add a menu item for the overflow in your menu.xml, setting it to always show and inflate in your onCreateOptionsMenu()
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
...
<item
android:id="#+id/action_overflow"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_action_settings"
android:title="#string/settings"
android:showAsAction="always">
</item>
</menu>
,
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
MenuInflater mi = getMenuInflater();
mi.inflate(R.menu.menu, menu);
return super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
}
Create a separate overflow_menu.xml resource for your choices you want in the overflow menu
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<item
android:id="#+id/overflow_action1"
android:title="#string/overflow_action1">
</item>
<item
android:id="#+id/overflow_action2"
android:title="#string/overflow_action2">
</item>
</menu>
In your onOptionsItemSelected() method, handle the selection of your overflow menu
#Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
switch (item.getItemId()) {
...
case R.id.action_overflow:
PopupMenu popup = new PopupMenu(
this, findViewById(R.id.action_overflow));
MenuInflater inflater = popup.getMenuInflater();
inflater.inflate(R.menu.overflow_menu, popup.getMenu());
popup.setOnMenuItemClickListener(this);
popup.show();
return true;
default:
return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
}
}
Implement the PopupMenu.OnMenuItemClickListener interface in your activity to handle the clicks of the overflow items
#Override
public boolean onMenuItemClick(MenuItem item) {
switch (item.getItemId()) {
case R.id.overflow_action1:
//do stuff
return true;
case R.id.overflow_action2:
//do stuff
return true;
default:
return false;
}
}

Android compatibility contextual action bar

In trying to follow the Android Design Guidelines, I'm running into a small quandary.
I want to have a list of items that I can long-press several of (multi-select), and then perform bulk actions on them.
The Design Guidelines suggest using the Contextual Action Bar for this, and it sounds perfectly like what I had in mind. Problem is, I'm trying to maintain compatibility backwards to API 7 (due to my phone being 2.3.3 currently).
I'm using ActionBarSherlock to get other actionbar stuff, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to either fire up a contextual action bar, nor have I figured out how to add buttons arbitrarily to the ActionBar in ABS. I see you can do tabs, so maybe that's the answer, but since I'm trying to allow multi-select, I don't want to have the normal modal context menu.

This is a late answer, but I think would help people stuck.
Opening the contextual action bar is actually pretty simple, at any point in your activity you just have to call:
startActionMode(mActionModeCallback);
If you are not in your main activity, like in fragments, you can get a reference with
getSherlockActivity().startActionMode(mActionModeCallback);
and this is the callback
private ActionMode.Callback mActionModeCallback = new ActionMode.Callback(){
#Override
public boolean onCreateActionMode(ActionMode mode, Menu menu) {
MenuInflater inflater = mode.getMenuInflater();
inflater.inflate(R.menu.actionbar_context_menu, menu);
return true;
}
#Override
public void onDestroyActionMode(ActionMode mode) {
}
#Override
public boolean onActionItemClicked(ActionMode mode, MenuItem item) {
switch (item.getItemId()) {
case R.id.menu_item1:
return true;
case R.id.menu_item2:
//close the action mode
//mode.finish();
return true;
default:
mode.finish();
return false;
}
}
};
The xml is a simple menu like the actionbar one:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<item android:id="#+id/menu_item1"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_item1"
android:title="#string/ITEM1"
android:showAsAction="always|withText" />
<item android:id="#+id/menu_item2"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_item2"
android:title="#string/ITEM2"
android:showAsAction="always|withText" />

Setting up contextual actionbar is the same to setting up the 'regular' ActionBar items as far as the XML is concerned. This example in the developer's guide explains it all.
In order to use ActionBarSherlock, replace the default Android-callbacks to the ActionBarSherlock-edited callbacks (e.g. instead of Android.View.ActionMode, use com.actionbarsherlock.view.ActionMode).

ActionBarSherlock has its own implementation of ActionMode, but you'll have to manualy controll its lifesycle, I wrote a tutorial about this.

For long click sample please refer to below links. First one is java code required for sample. And second one is how to define the layout;
Java source
Layout xml

I will answer second part of your question. Here is an example how to add any View instance (button in the code below) actionbar with ActionBarSherlock library:
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
refreshButton = (RotatingButton) LayoutInflater.from(this).inflate(R.layout.actionbar_customview_refresh, null);
refreshButton.setOnClickListener(refreshButtonListener);
MenuItem item = menu.add(0, android.R.id.copy, 0, getString(R.string.actionbar_refresh));
item.setActionView(refreshButton);
item.setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_ALWAYS);
MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();
inflater.inflate(R.menu.main_activity_action_bar, menu);
}

I was facing the same issue. It was solved when I found this link. Basically, you have to create a callback class that implements ActionMode.Callback. In this class, you inflate the Action Bar with your contextual Action Bar. At each selection (or long click), you start the callback using the startActionMode method. See the link for an working code =]
EDIT: There is also an example on Sherlock's samples under /samples/demos/src/com/actionbarsherlock/sample/demos/ActionModes.java

Overflow button forces Action Mode to finish

I have an EditText and I want the user to be able to select some text and apply some basic formatting to the selected text (bold, italic, etc). I still want the standard copy, cut, paste options to show, though. I read somewhere in the Android documentation that to do this, you should call setCustomSelectionActionModeCallback() on the EditText and pass it an ActionModeCallback(), so that's what I did. Here's my code:
In my activity's onCreate() method:
myEditText.setCustomSelectionActionModeCallback(new TextSelectionActionMode());
Callback declaration:
private class TextSelectionActionMode implements ActionMode.Callback {
#Override
public boolean onActionItemClicked(ActionMode mode, MenuItem item) {
return false;
}
#Override
public boolean onCreateActionMode(ActionMode mode, Menu menu) {
menu.add("Bold");
return true;
}
#Override
public void onDestroyActionMode(ActionMode mode) {
}
#Override
public boolean onPrepareActionMode(ActionMode mode, Menu menu) {
return false;
}
}
The problem I'm having is that when I click on the overflow button (to access my "Bold" menu item), the ActionMode gets closed immediately. If I set it to always show as an action, using this:
MenuItem bold = menu.add("Bold");
bold.setShowAsActionFlags(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_ALWAYS);
It works fine and I can click on it (though it obviously does nothing). What am I missing here?
Edit: Just wanted to add that I run into the exact same problem if I actually inflate a menu instead of adding menu items programmatically. Once again, though, the problem goes away if I force it to always show as an action.

It's frameworks issue. If textview receive 'focus changed' event, then textview stop the action mode. When overflow popup is shown, textview miss focus.

This issue has been solved in Android 6.0. However you should use ActionMode.Callback2 as described here in Android 6.0.
For Android 5.x and below, I recommend this workaround: add a button to Toolbar or ActionBar which records the current selection and then open another context menu.
this.inputText_selectionStart = inputText.getSelectionStart();
this.inputText_selectionEnd = inputText.getSelectionEnd();
registerForContextMenu(inputText);
openContextMenu(inputText);
unregisterForContextMenu(inputText);

It is a filed Android bug: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82640.
That link contains a workaround. Fortunately this has been fixed in Android 6.0.