How To show icons in Overflow menu in ActionBar

Mihir picture Mihir · Aug 22, 2013 · Viewed 63.8k times · Source

I know it's not possible using the native API. Is there a workaround to implement that kind of view?

Answer

Simon picture Simon · Mar 9, 2014

The previously posted answer is OK, generally speaking. But it basically removes the default behaviour of the Overflow menu. Things like how many icons can be displayed on different screen-sizes and then they dropped off into the overflow menu when they can't be displayed. By doing the above you remove a lot of important functionality.

A better method would be to tell the overflow menu to display the icons directly. You can do this by adding the following code to your Activity.

@Override
public boolean onMenuOpened(int featureId, Menu menu)
{
    if(featureId == Window.FEATURE_ACTION_BAR && menu != null){
        if(menu.getClass().getSimpleName().equals("MenuBuilder")){
            try{
                Method m = menu.getClass().getDeclaredMethod(
                    "setOptionalIconsVisible", Boolean.TYPE);
                m.setAccessible(true);
                m.invoke(menu, true);
            }
            catch(NoSuchMethodException e){
                Log.e(TAG, "onMenuOpened", e);
            }
            catch(Exception e){
                throw new RuntimeException(e);
            }
        }
    }
    return super.onMenuOpened(featureId, menu);
}