Question

I want to use the split Action Bar – one on top, one on bottom. I know you can call it with this:

uiOptions="splitActionBarWhenNarrow"

My 2 questions are simple concepts:

I would like only two items on the bottom; one on far left, one on far right. Is this possible? It seems to be almost an overflow and pushes everything up top — down to the bottom. Is there a way to control what items will show up on which bar?

Also, I have holo.light.darkactionbar theme. Yet, for the bottom bar, it keeps the light background AND the white text so you can not see the icons – is it possible to apply dark background like the top bar?

Answer 1

I would like only two items on the bottom; one on far left, one on far right. Is this possible? It seems to be almost an overflow and pushes everything up top — down to the bottom. Is there a way to control what items will show up on which bar?

Unfortunately not. All action items will be pushed on to the bottom bar when using the split action bar. One way to get around this would be to not use the split action bar, and have a custom view at the bottom holding buttons for all the items you want at the bottom. You’d probably be able to emulate the style of an split action bar fairly well using themes.

Also, I have holo.light.darkactionbar theme. Yet, for the bottom bar, it keeps the light background AND the white text so you can not see the icons – is it possible to apply dark background like the top bar?

This sounds odd and isn’t standard behaviour (both bars are dark in my app), are you using a custom theme? If you want to override this manually, define a theme with a custom android:backgroundSplit value as shown on the Android Developers website.