Android menu item showAsAction="always" doesn't work

Question

I have tried setting the:

android:showAsAction=".."

to every one of these:

ifRoom, never, withText, always, collapseActionView

but I always got the same result, which is not having any buttons on the action bar, so I have to press the 'menu' button.

Here is a picture of the menu now :

current menu

<item android:id="@+id/smth1"
    android:title="@string/smth1"
    android:showAsAction="always"
    android:orderInCategory="1" />

I have even tried adding this:

android:uiOptions="splitActionBarWhenNarrow"

into application manifest file, but with no positive result (nothing changed).

I have tried running it on various kind of APIs (14, 16, 17, 19), but with the same result.

If my question seems to be unclear, here is a picture of a menu, which I would like to have:

enter image description here

Thanks for any help.

Do you use the v7 support library because there is many problems due to this library ? ... — Laurent Meyer, Mar 23 '14 at 14:44
Then search a bit in this way because there is a lot of "problems" with this library, here are a link which can be helpful : http://stackoverflow.com/a/17881737/2545832 (I think it'll solve your problem) — Laurent Meyer, Mar 23 '14 at 14:49
possible duplicate of [android.support.v7 with \`ActionBarActivity\` no menu shows](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17881547/android-support-v7-with-actionbaractivity-no-menu-shows) — Blo, Mar 23 '14 at 14:56

score 14 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:45

You need to use the compatibility namespace (see here)

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">

<item android:id="@+id/menu_add_size"
    android:title="@string/menu_add_item"
    android:icon="@android:drawable/ic_menu_add" 
    app:showAsAction="always"/>
</menu>

Once you're using that you can use as many menu buttons as will fit. You're no longer limited to just two buttons + overflow showing.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 23 '14 at 14:52

0

You maybe just don't have enough space, you should first remove the title from your Activity by adding this to your onCreate method:

ActionBar actionBar = getActionBar();
actionBar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false);

Then you can see here that the maximum number of icons you can display is directly linked to the width of your screen, on small phones you will only be able to see 2 icons in the ActionBar.

answered Mar 23 '14 at 14:52

Yoann Hercouet

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I have enough, I have tried it with many different resolutions. But thanks for a reply. – Vilda Mar 23 '14 at 14:54
How do you inflate the menu in the code? XML only is not enough. – Yoann Hercouet Mar 23 '14 at 14:59
`public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main, menu); return true; }` – Vilda Mar 23 '14 at 15:01
Are you still using `android:uiOptions="splitActionBarWhenNarrow"`? Because this will remove the buttons from the top. – Yoann Hercouet Mar 23 '14 at 15:03
And puts them at the bottom. But hey, it works now thanks to previous replies. Thx to everyone. – Vilda Mar 23 '14 at 15:04

Android menu item showAsAction="always" doesn't work

2 Answers2