Android - How to start select mode

Question

In my Android app I need to provide some custom actions on the contextual action menu after the user selects some text. To do so, I capture long clicks and start the action mode, providing a custom ActionMode.Callback (as pointed out in Android Docs). The problem is that this way the selection text cursors won't show up. So, is there any way to activate the selection text mode programmatically??

Answer 1

public void SelectText(){
  try{
    KeyEvent shiftPressEvent = 
       new KeyEvent(0, 0, KeyEvent.ACTION_DOWN, 
       KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SHIFT_LEFT, 0, 0);
   shiftPressEvent.dispatch(mWebView);
  }catch(Exception e){
   throw new AssertionError(e);
  }
 }

In this case we are activating text select on mWebView

Answer 2

Use startActionMode().

See How to invoke the ActionBar's ContextMenu-like behavior?