Question

Apologies for what I am sure is a common question, but after Googling for a while it seems I don’t know the proper Android term for what I want and so am stuck.

I would like to know how to work with the main pop-up menu associated with a view…that is, if you are sitting at some activity doing nothing and press the menu key on the phone, how to work with that menu that commonly opens on many apps containing “Settings”, “Exit”, etc.

I am not sure what this is called, but if someone can point me to the appropriate portion of the SDK, that would be appreciated. Also, if someone knows how to work this menu within the context of the Eclipse ADT plugin, that’d be great, too.

Cheers.

Answer 1

As CaseyB says, it’s just called a menu.

For a quick start on using it, you could create a subfolder in the res folder of an eclipse project and call it “menu” add in some xml for the view, and the call a MenuInflator from the onCreateOptionsMenu function.

Ok, that might be a bit confusing, so i’ve included some sample code that should get you started. This code should make it so when you press the menu button you can select one of two new activities to get loaded.

In Main Activity add:

import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MenuInflater;
import android.view.MenuItem;


    @Override
    public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
        MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();
        inflater.inflate(R.menu.menu, menu);
        return true;
    }
// Define whatever other activities you can to load in here or whatever. 
    @Override
    public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
        switch (item.getItemId()) {
        case R.id.info:
            startActivity(new Intent(this, Info.class));
            break;
        case R.id.logs:
            startActivity(new Intent(this, Logs.class));
            break;
        }
        return true;
    }

menu.xml file: Link to whatever icon images you want.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- -->
<!--  Copyright © 2012 Tutela Technologies Ltd. -->
<!--  All Rights Reserved. -->
<!-- -->
<menu
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item 
        android:id="@+id/info" 
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_info_details"
        android:title="Info"></item>
    <item 
        android:id="@+id/logs" 
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_report_image"
        android:title="Logs"></item>

</menu>

Then in your AndroidManifest.xml make sure you remember to add in the new activities.

    <activity 
        android:name="com.whatever.Gui.Info" 
        android:label="@string/appTitle">
    </activity>
    <activity 
        android:name="com.whatever.Gui.Logs" 
        android:label="@string/appTitle">
    </activity>

Note: in this example the labels are defined in strings.xml

<string name="appTitle">Your App name</string>

Hope this helps you!

Cheers