getActionBar() returns null

Christian Skogsberg picture Christian Skogsberg · Jul 29, 2011 · Viewed 162.1k times · Source

I'm having an odd problem. I am making an app with targetsdk 13.

In my main activity's onCreate method i call getActionBar() to setup my actionbar. This works fine when running on the Android 3.2 emulator, but when using Android 3.0 and 3.1 the getActionBar() method returns null.

I find this extremely odd, and i cannot see any reason why it would do so. Is this a bug with the emulators or is there something i need to do, in order to ensure that my application has an actionbar?

SOLUTION: I think I've found a solution for this problem. I wasn't using the setContentView to set a layout for the activity. Instead I was using fragmentTransaction.add(android.R.id.content, mFragment, mTag) to add a fragment to the activity. This worked fine in 3.2, but in earlier honeycomb versions the action bar is apparently not set if you don't use the setContentView in the onCreate() method. So I fixed it by using the setContentView() method in my onCreate() method and just supplying it with a layout that contained an empty FrameLayout. I can still use the fragmentTransaction.add(android.R.id.content, mFragment, mTag) method the same way as before.

It's not the prettiest fix, but it works.

Answer

Amir picture Amir · Dec 30, 2014

Can use getSupportActionBar() instead of getActionBar() method.