Question

I have been using the following workaround to center the activity label (without having to resort to a custom title in XML layout):

((TextView)((FrameLayout)((LinearLayout)((ViewGroup) getWindow().getDecorView()).getChildAt(0)).getChildAt(0)).getChildAt(0)).setGravity(Gravity.CENTER);

This works great but every once in a while I see one of the users (on Google Play) getting a

java.lang.ClassCastException:
com.android.internal.widget.ActionBarView cannot be cast to
android.widget.TextView

These are probably tablet users who are running Android 3.x or higher.

Short of implementing my own custom title that would give me direct access to the activity label, can you recommend another way to avoid that ActionBarView to TextView ClassCastException?

Perhaps check for the Android version under which the app currently runs and go though another level of getChildAt(0)?

Answer 1

The action bar is defined in the theme. So if you want to avoid that ever showing up you need to pick different theme.

Alternatively you can detect what version of OS the user is using and in the case of being 11 (Honeycomb) and higher simply skip the action bar and get the next view.

Which would look something like

if (Integer.valueOf(android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK) > 11)
{
    ((TextView)((FrameLayout)((LinearLayout)((ViewGroup).getWindow().getDecorView()).getChildAt(1)).getChildAt(0)).getChildAt(0)).setGravity(Gravity.CENTER);
}
else
   ((TextView)((FrameLayout)((LinearLayout)((ViewGroup).getWindow().getDecorView()).getChildAt(0)).getChildAt(0)).getChildAt(0)).setGravity(Gravity.CENTER);

I would also like to add like Shark said, this is a total hack and is not very robust code. You should be using findViewById() to locate your views and avoid all of that super ugly casting. You can expect your hack or even the code I just put in to break in the future if you continue down that path.