Different views / styles for a specific menu item on an ActionBar

Question

In my Android application, I configure the ActionBar following tips from the Android Developers Blog and other places. I would like to highlight a specific menu item in an ActionBar, for example. with a different background color, since it is especially applicable to the currently visible fragment (which actually added it). However, I did not find any indication that this can be done, and I have not yet been able to do this. Is it possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

So, I got this to work now with a little trick. Here is a snippet of code

@Override public void onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu, MenuInflater inflater) { super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu, inflater); menuItemCreateCart = menu.findItem(R.id.menuItemCreateCart); if (menuItemCreateCart == null) { menuItemCreateCart = menu.add(0, R.id.menuItemCreateCart, 0, R.string.Create); } TextView tv = new TextView(getActivity()); tv.setText(R.string.Create); tv.setTextColor(getResources().getColor(R.color.green)); tv.setBackgroundColor(getResources().getColor(R.color.lightBlue)); tv.setOnClickListener( new View.OnClickListener() { @Override public void onClick(View view) { createCart(); } } ); menuItemCreateCart.setActionView(tv); 

The main question is that onclicklistener should be installed on the view that you specify as the type of action, and not the menu item for it to work. This way you can do whatever you want.

Also note that you cannot use getActionView to retrieve the originally specified view with a title, because it will return null. This appears to be more of an alternative view than the actual default menu item view.