How can I get the options menu of my Activity?

Question

In some methods of my Activity I want to check the title of menu or know if it is checked or not. How can I get Activity's menu. I need something like this.getMenu()

Hagio

"Name" and "Checked" ? I don't get it. Id and preferences? – Detta

are you talking about the options menu? Like the one created in "public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu)" ? – Lass

@Keyser: in some situations the title of menu items is changed. – Hagio

Answer 1

Be wary of invalidateOptionsMenu(). It recreates the entire menu. This has a lot of overhead and will reset embedded components like the SearchView. It took me quite a while to track down why my SearchView would "randomly" close.

I ended up capturing the menu as posted by Dark and then call onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu) as necessary. This met my requirement without an nasty side effects. Gotcha: Make sure to do a null check in case you call onPrepareOptionsMenu() before the menu is created. I did this as below:

private Menu mOptionsMenu;

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(final Menu menu) {
    mOptionsMenu = menu
    ...
}

private void updateOptionsMenu() {
    if (mOptionsMenu != null) {
        onPrepareOptionsMenu(mOptionsMenu);
    }
}

Belgian

Awesome answer, For some reason I couldn't figure out which menu to pass to onPrepareOptionsMenu() as I wanted to change it depending on conditions that only happen when my service is started etc etc. Anyway – Surplice

I would agree that the overhead is a bit too much and very noticeable if using invalidateOptionsMenu(). I would prefer this solution to use less workload. – Calabrese

Using this I keep getting null whenever screen is ratated. – Actin

If you have a menu object, it is better than this solution – Natika

Don't we have any property or method in Activity to get MenuItems outside onCreateOptionsMenu()/onOptionsItemSelected()? – Anne

Answer 2

Call invalidateOptionsMenu() instead of passing menu object around.

Dorie

Unfortunately, added in API level 11 :( – Gospodin

better answer, with actual code ie.) requireActivity().invalidateOptionsMenu() – Intramundane

Answer 3

you could do it by passing the Menu object to your Activity class

public class MainActivity extends Activity
{
    ...
    ...
    private Menu _menu = null;

    @Override
    public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) 
    {
        // Inflate the menu; this adds items to the action bar if it is present.
        getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.activity_main, menu);
        _menu = menu;
        return true;
    }

    private Menu getMenu()
    {
        //use it like this
        return _menu;
    }
}

Packhorse

Call invalidateOptionsMenu() is better ! and you just have to provide your update in the method onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu). – Unpremeditated

Answer 4

There several callback methods that provide menu as a parameter.

You might wanna manipulate it there.

For example:

onCreateContextMenu(ContextMenu menu, View v, ContextMenu.ContextMenuInfo menuInfo)
onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu)
onCreatePanelMenu(int featureId, Menu menu)

There several more, best you take a look in activity documentation and look for your desired method: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html

Joint

in your solution values are not up to date – Hagio

dont know the exact behaivior but do you think saving the reference in a field variable would do it? Like: onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu){ this.menu = menu . . . . and access it asking for title later? – Joint

I cant believe there is no method that simply returns the Menu object. Like how we can get context, window, layout inflater and more of the activity. – Natika

Answer 5

As far as I could understand what you want here is which may help you:

1. Refer this tutorial over option menu.

2. Every time user presses menu button you can check it's title thru getTitle().

3. Or if you want to know the last menu item checked or selected when user has not pressed the menu button then you need to store the preferences when user presses.

Gormley

Answer 6

Android now has the Toolbar widget which was a Menu you can set/get. Set the Toolbar in your Activity with some variation of setSupportActionBar(Toolbar) for stuff like onCreateOptionsMenu from a Fragment for example. Thread revived!

Odontology