ActionBar in PreferenceActivity
Solution 1
Edit: My answer below is rather hacky and it seems like it is now outdated (for pre Android 3.0) Have a look at the other answers for less hacky and more current solutions ~pyko 2014-09-01
I managed to get it working - not sure if this is the nicest/cleanest solution, but it works.
Had to make the following changes:
-
Make a copy of
ActionBarActivity
and have the new class extendPreferenceActivity
public abstract class ActionBarPreferenceActivity extends PreferenceActivity { // contents exactly the same as 'ActionBarActivity' }
-
Modify
onCreate()
inActionBarHelperBase.java
slightly - make a special case forPreferenceActivity
classes@Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { // If the activity is a PreferenceActivity, don't make the request if (!(mActivity instanceof PreferenceActivity)) { mActivity.requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_CUSTOM_TITLE); }
-
Have your PreferenceActivity extend this class and add request for
FEATURE_CUSTOM_TITLE
before you callsuper.onCreate()
public class MyPreferenceActivity extends ActionBarPreferenceActivity { @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_CUSTOM_TITLE); // add this line super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preferences); // etc etc } // etc etc }
As far as I can tell, changes 2 and 3 are needed because for PreferenceActivity
:
"As soon as you call super.onCreate(), the ViewGroup will be set up and so, you are not allowed to change the Window's parameters." (see Oliver's comment to the answer)
I guess the order of how components in PreferenceActivity
activities are created is different to plain Activity
activities .
Solution 2
If you want to try a PreferenceFragment implementation based on support-v4 Fragment:
https://github.com/kolavar/android-support-v4-preferencefragment
I´m using it by myself and it isnt much work turning PreferenceActivity into PreferenceFragment.
Solution 3
Can you just clone the code for ActionBarActivity, and change "extends Activity" to "extends PreferenceActivity"? Then extend your new class instead of ActionBarActivity.
From all the Google apps I've seen, though, it seems unusual to put buttons in the action bar of a PreferenceActivity. If you're not putting buttons on it, you could just use a values-v11 alternate style resource to show the holo theme, and set that style in the manifest for your PreferenceActivity.
Solution 4
I used in my application this actionbar https://github.com/johannilsson/android-actionbar and it's work great with this thread How to add a button to PreferenceScreen
Solution 5
I'd like to thank to @pyko providing a great answer, but it has problem that it won't work well on HoneyComb and above. well you can have a hack way to get it around like @AndroidDev said; But @pyko is gonna pollute the ActionBarHelperBase class, and @AndroidDev isn't very transparent.The best way is to create ActionBarActivityPreferences who extends from PreferenceActivity; and in onCreate method, change the order of calling parent method:
@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
//IMPORTATNT: MAKE SURE actionBarHelper called before super;
//as super oncreate of prefenceactivity is actuallying setting the content view
mActionBarHelper.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
}
why calls 'mActionBarHelper.onCreate(savedInstanceState);' before 'super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);' , that is because super (i.e. PreferenceActivity) is actually setting the content view in its onCreate method, which would cause crash ("requestFeature() must be called before adding content'). SO what you need do is to swap the order, make sure ' mActionBarHelper.onCreate(savedInstanceState);' is called before super. In this way, we don't need to pollute the 'ActionBarHelperBase' yet we keep SettingActivity very clean because we encapsulate the tricky detail to 'ActionBarActivityPreferences' and bang!
Matthias Robbers
App developer from Hamburg, Germany. Author of Shortbread, annotation-based app shortcuts: https://github.com/MatthiasRobbers/shortbread
Updated on July 05, 2022Comments
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Matthias Robbers almost 2 years
In my application I am using the new Action Bar Compatibility sample from Google (located at
<sdk>/samples/android-<version>/ActionBarCompat
) which works great. The only problem I have is applying this to myPreferenceActivity
in order to get a screen like the settings in the Android Market (see picture).To fill the
ActionBar
with icons, eachActivity
must extend theActionBarActivity
class. The problem is that myActivity
already extendsPreferenceActivity
and in Java classes can not extend more than one class.There must be a way to get the
ActionBar
together with aPreferenceScreen
. I would be glad if anybody could provide a solution for this common issue.P.S.: A solution like in How to add a button to PreferenceScreen does not fit because the
ActionBar
is actually the title bar and so this is more a Java than a layout thing. -
Matthias Robbers over 12 yearsThanks. I now use ActionBarSherlock which is very nice. The first versions of this library used johannilsson's Actionbar as the basis.
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Matthias Robbers over 12 yearsThank you for working this out. It seems like there is no clean solution for this. I now use ActionBarSherlock for Action bar implementations which provides much more functionality than the Android compatibility action bar.
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dirkvranckaert about 12 yearsIn order to get this working I had to check if the android api version was below 3.0 (= 11) otherwise this didn't work. So in the preference class I have to do this before the super.onCreate(...): if (ContextUtils.getAndroidApiVersion() < OSContants.API.HONEYCOMB_3_0) { requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_CUSTOM_TITLE); // For compatibility with the action-bar }
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Admin about 10 yearsNo because of the
ActionBarActivityDelegate
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CQM about 10 yearsSetting up a normal actionbaractivity that simply loads in a PreferenceFragment accomplishes this. In case anyone else gets here but didn't consider this simple solution.
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Someone Somewhere about 10 yearsWhen you say "Make a copy of ActionBarActivity" do you mean to take the source code and copy it into my own project ? For example, from here? android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/support/+/…
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William over 9 yearsMaybe this worked once upon a time, but with appcompat-v7_19.1.0
ActionBarActivity#onCreate
callsActionBarActivityDelegate.createDelegate((ActionBarActivity) this)
. Which means that you cannot pass in aPreferenceActivity
subclass.