Android compatibility contextual action bar

Question

In trying to follow the Android Design Guidelines, I'm running into a small quandary.

I want to have a list of items that I can long-press several of (multi-select), and then perform bulk actions on them.

The Design Guidelines suggest using the Contextual Action Bar for this, and it sounds perfectly like what I had in mind. Problem is, I'm trying to maintain compatibility backwards to API 7 (due to my phone being 2.3.3 currently).

I'm using ActionBarSherlock to get other actionbar stuff, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to either fire up a contextual action bar, nor have I figured out how to add buttons arbitrarily to the ActionBar in ABS. I see you can do tabs, so maybe that's the answer, but since I'm trying to allow multi-select, I don't want to have the normal modal context menu.

Answer 1

This is a late answer, but I think would help people stuck.

Opening the contextual action bar is actually pretty simple, at any point in your activity you just have to call:

startActionMode(mActionModeCallback);

If you are not in your main activity, like in fragments, you can get a reference with

getSherlockActivity().startActionMode(mActionModeCallback);

and this is the callback

private ActionMode.Callback mActionModeCallback = new ActionMode.Callback(){

    @Override 
    public boolean onCreateActionMode(ActionMode mode, Menu menu) {
          MenuInflater inflater = mode.getMenuInflater();
          inflater.inflate(R.menu.actionbar_context_menu, menu);
          return true;
        }

    @Override
    public void onDestroyActionMode(ActionMode mode) {

    }

    @Override
    public boolean onActionItemClicked(ActionMode mode, MenuItem item) {
        switch (item.getItemId()) {
            case R.id.menu_item1:
                return true;
            case R.id.menu_item2:
                //close the action mode
                //mode.finish();
                return true;
            default:
                mode.finish();
                return false;
       }
    }
};

The xml is a simple menu like the actionbar one:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

<item android:id="@+id/menu_item1"
      android:icon="@drawable/ic_item1"
      android:title="@string/ITEM1"
      android:showAsAction="always|withText" />

<item android:id="@+id/menu_item2"
      android:icon="@drawable/ic_item2"
      android:title="@string/ITEM2"
      android:showAsAction="always|withText" />