Question

I have an app that uses ActionBarSherlock to provide a ViewPager control for tab navigation, as well as a standard ActionBar. Everything’s working fine, except for the fact that when I use a custom ActionBar view, the action bar moves its position to below the tab controls.

When using a standard ActionBar (i.e. no custom view), everything works as expected:

However, when I switch the ActionBar to use a custom view (with no other code changes whatsoever), the action bar switches to below the tab controls:

Is there any particular reason for this? Is there anything I can do to use a custom action bar view, but still laid out with the action bar above the tabs? All of the XML layouts being used in this example are extremely bare-bones, as noted in the code below.

I’m using ActionBarSherlock 4.1.0 (as of this writing, the latest stable release). This behavior occurs on both Android 2.2 (the earliest version I’m supporting) and Android 4.1.

My ABS initialization code:

setContentView( R.layout.main ); // XML layout that currently contains only the ViewPager
mViewPager = (ViewPager) findViewById( R.id.viewPager );

// Set up action bar
ActionBar ab = getSupportActionBar();
Drawable gd = getResources().getDrawable( R.drawable.actionbar_bg ); // Background gradient
ab.setBackgroundDrawable( gd );
ab.setCustomView( R.layout.actionbar_custom ); // For this example, contains just a TextView
ab.setDisplayOptions( ActionBar.DISPLAY_SHOW_CUSTOM );

// Set up tabs
ab.setNavigationMode( ActionBar.NAVIGATION_MODE_TABS );
mTabsAdapter = new TabsAdapter( this, mViewPager );
mTabsAdapter.addTab( ab.newTab().setText( "Tab 1" ), Tab1Fragment.class, null );
mTabsAdapter.addTab( ab.newTab().setText( "Tab 2" ), Tab2Fragment.class, null );
mTabsAdapter.addTab( ab.newTab().setText( "Tab 3" ), Tab3Fragment.class, null );

Answer 1

Murphy’s Law of stumbling onto the answer for your own question right after you post it to Stack Overflow strikes again.

Adding ActionBar.DISPLAY_SHOW_HOME to ab.setDisplayOptions() will cause the ActionBar to return to the top of the screen.

That’s an acceptable solution for this particular project (as I probably will want to have the Home icon there regardless), but I would still be curious to know if there’s any other way to accomplish this for those who — for some reason — would not prefer to display the Home icon.