Develop Reference

Android: Hide 3 dots from Navigation view header at right

How to hide 3 dots from Navigation header which comes in the right of header? This could be repeated question. I found few similar questions and their answers but they were for older version of Android. I am using Android sdk 21.
Any idea how to hide that 3 dot button?

Just Remove Override Method like this
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.search_and_add, menu);
return true;
}
This Override Method is responsible to for creating three dote as you mention it's really OptionMenu. If you don't want it, don't override onCreateOptionsMenumethod.
Alternative
Don't Inflate the menu xml. Just block the line like this
//getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.search_and_add, menu);
other code can remain same. No problem at all..

Those "3 Dots" are the "Overflow" menu, and is created when you establish a menu using a file in the menu resources directory.
If you have buttons or functionality you are wanting to expose via you action bar, you will need to have the overflow buttons (or instead, you can choose to have your buttons exposed at the top level inside the Action bar.
If you really don't want a menu, get rid of the menu.xml file describing this menu, and then get rid of the onCreateOptionsMenu() from your Activity.
Here are the official docs, which describe how this works.

I think you are speaking about the options menu, to get rid of it remove the override of the method onCreateOptionsMenu

In your menu folder the xmlfile that is used by your activity, change the app:showAsAction="never" to app:showAsAction="always" or some other you can see the options that are availabe by pressing ctrl+space.
Or else to get rid of it completely just remove the whole code and it's corresponding usages.

Is it possible to have a action bar menu using the appcompat library?

recently I've switched from the regular action bar implementation to the recently released appcompat implementation. My app made heavy use of the action bar to provide functionality. Since switching, on older spots
APIs (less than 11) don't have any menu items. And newer APIs do, but they don't show the image like configured (if room|withText). Has anyone else experienced this or came up with any solutions?

I found out what was up, when using the appcompat library. You can create your menu just like normal.
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main, menu);
return true;
}
But, in your menu xml files, add a xmlns:app attribute to the menu tag, like so:
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto" >
then, in each of your menu items, where you usually specify the "showAs" style (ifRoom, withText, etc.), include this alternative line alongside the regular one:
app:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText"
android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText"
After this, your menus will show correctly on both current and old APIs. I got this information from here.

If there is a physical "Menu" button on device, it will show the contextual menu. If not, the menu item will be added to the ActionBar.

What does onPrepareOptionsMenu do?

I want to make Option Menu for Android, I have visit this site. In their script, I found onPrepareOptionsMenu, I try to compile and run using Android 2.3.3 compiler with and without onPrepareOptionsMenu, both works, but I didn't see any difference.
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu){
//code here
}
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item){
//code here
}
public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu){
//code here
}
What is actually onPrepareOptionsMenu method do? Is that method important? Could I just delete the method?
Addition
Oh, I also hear about Action Bar in Android 3.0, it says that Action Bar is the alternative way for make Option Menu, and it using onPrepareOptionsMenu. Is that right?
Thank you...

Take a look in the API:
Prepare the Screen's standard options menu to be displayed. This is called right before the menu is shown, every time it is shown. You can use this method to efficiently enable/disable items or otherwise dynamically modify the contents.

If you want to alter the menu before it's shown to the user, you can put code to do that into onPrepareOptionsMenu. I've used that dynamically to disable some menu options in some circumstances.
As an example of when one might want to disable a menu option, I had an app where there was a way of specifying a destination. One of my menu options was to calculate a route to the destination. However, if a destination wasn't specified, that option didn't apply, so I used onPrepareOptionsMenu to disable that menu option when it wasn't applicable.
From Android 3.0 and beyond, there's the ActionBar, which is a menu bar. The most important items go into the ActionBar itself, but then there's an overflow for when there's not enough room on the action bar. One can specify that menu items should always be in the overflow menu and never on the action bar itself. On some devices, the action bar overflow corresponds to the permanent menu button on the device, whereas on other devices which don't have a menu button the overflow menu is seen on the right hand side of the action bar as three vertical dots.

onCreateOptionsMenu is called once, when your activity is first created. If it returns false, no option menu is shown and onPrepareOptionsMenu is never called.
If onCreateOptionsMenu returns true, onPrepareOptionsMenu is also called before the activity is displayed, and also every time the options menu is invalidated. Use onPrepareOptionsMenu if you need to enable/disable, show/hide, or add/remove items after creating it.
If your menu does not change, use onCreateOptionsMenu.

example
#Override
public void onPrepareOptionsMenu(#NonNull Menu menu) {
super.onPrepareOptionsMenu(menu);
if(!URLUtil.isValidUrl(news.geturl())){
menu.findItem(R.id.share).setVisible(false);
}
}

Android: removing Sherlock Action Bar items for some classes

I'm having Sherlock Action Bar to show several icons in the Action Bar, like sharing, info, etc.
The thing is that I want to delete, for certain activities/fragments one of the buttons (sharing), but I can't do it.
My activity (StartActivity) extends from InfoActivity, which is the one that implements the onCreateOptionsMenu.
I tried to override the onCreateOptionsMenu method and do a clear() but it doesn't work:
#Override
public void onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu, MenuInflater inflater) {
super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu, inflater);
}
Any ideas on how to do this?
Thanks a lot in advance.

Find the menu item in question and disable or hide it. Something like this in onCreateOptionsMenu() or onPrepareOptionsMenu() if you want to make it dynamic:
menu.findItem(R.id.menu_share).setVisible(false);

What I did in the end, was creating different classes: one with the Sharing button in the menu as a button, and one without, and just making the proper activity extend from the appropriate class.
For example, StartActivity, I don't want it to have sharing capabilities, so I made it extend from an Activity without the sharing button.
Thanks #NikolayElenkov for your help!

android honeycomb - how to make options menu item look disabled?

I am trying to disable one of the options menu items using the foll code:
public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu (Menu menu){
menu.findItem(R.id.menu_item_id).setEnabled(false);
return true;
}
However after the method is executed, disabled item looks just like the rest (enabled) of the menu.
Is it possible to make it look disabled (grayed out or something)? How?
Thanks in advance

Have you looked at Themes? Check out this post: How to change the Text color of Menu item in Android?
Once you set up a Theme, you may find this helpful for finding what values can be set: Themes XML