Question

I currently have an application in the play store for both tablets and smartphone runnings Android 3.0+ (http://tinyurl.com/cnejnjs). In order to appeal to more users I am looking into getting the application to work on a large range of devices.

I am aware of ActionBar Sherlock and this seems to do almost everything I want. One thing it does not offer is the Search Widget which I make use of in the current application.

Is there any way to have a search box in the actionbar which updates the current list fragment on screen in a similar way to how the default search widget works?

Answer 1

The search widget is just a simple expandable action item. You can create your own very easily by using an EditText as the expanded layout. You can see this in the “Collapsible Action Item” example from the Feature Demos (though it is only a very basic example).

You can also use the built-in widget on Honeycomb and up from the compatibility library:

Context context = getSupportActionBar().getThemedContext();
View searchView = SearchViewCompat.newSearchView(context);
if (searchView != null) {
    //Use native implementation
} else {
    //Use simple compatibility implementation
}

Supporting a 99% compatibile implementation is also on the roadmap.