Android SearchView Icon

Question

I want to disable the Mag icon displayed inside the search view component. Any idea how to reference it and remove it or replace it with another drawable ?

Answer 1

Since the wording of the question does not contain any mention of ActionBarSherlock (except for the tag) and comments have been added that the accepted answer does not work for standard and/or support library action bar, I'm posting another answer. Here is the Java code for onCreate:

// obtain action bar
ActionBar actionBar = getSupportActionBar();

// find SearchView (im my case it's in a custom layout because of left alignment)
View v = actionBar.getCustomView();
SearchView searchView = (SearchView)v.findViewById(R.id.search_view);
ImageView icon = (ImageView)searchView.findViewById(android.support.v7.appcompat.R.id.search_mag_icon);

// method 1: does not work persistently, because the next line
// should be probably called after every manipulation with SearchView
// icon.setVisibility(View.GONE);

// method 2: working code
icon.setAdjustViewBounds(true);
icon.setMaxWidth(0);
icon.setLayoutParams(new LinearLayout.LayoutParams(LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT));
icon.setImageDrawable(null);

_{According to this post, while using a SearchView from the support library (android-support-v7-appcompat in my case) with setIconifiedByDefault(false) the icon is displayed outside edit textbox (SearchAutoComplete). Otherwise (setIconifiedByDefault(true)) it's displayed inside the box. The presented code is used for disabled "iconification" by default, and may require some changes to work with "iconified" search view. I don't know if the same applies to ActionBarSherlock.}

Hope this helps.