Question

I have an activity configured with splitActionBarWhenNarrow that uses requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_ACTION_BAR_OVERLAY).

And I need to check if screen is considered narrow to know if splitbar is visible because I have to change the position of one bottom component to don’t overlap with splitActionbar when visible.

PD: I know how to check orientation but I’m not sure if portrait is always equal to narrow

Answer 1

By checking the ActionBarSherlock sources I’ve found a solution that seems to work very well: Create a values.xml in your values resource directory and add a new boolean property like this:

<resources>
    <bool name="screen_is_narrow">true</bool>
</resources>

Then create a second values.xml in the values-w480dp directory:

<resources>
    <bool name="screen_is_narrow">false</bool>
</resources>

This second resource will automatically be loaded if the screen is wider than 480dp. In portrait mode your phone screen is smaller than that so screen_is_narrow is true whereas in landscape mode and on tablets it is wider and thus screen_is_narrow becomes false.

Based on that logic you can simply do a check in your Activity code now:

boolean screenIsNarrow = getResources().getBoolean(R.bool.screen_is_narrow);

That should do the trick. In case you’re already using ActionBarSherlock then there’s an even easier solution as the booleans have been predefined already. Simply check for R.bool.abs__split_action_bar_is_narrow in your code.