Question

I’m developing a Android application, using the ActionBarSherlock library. In one activity, I use a tabbed navigation in combination with a collapsed ActionBar (action items at the bottom).

In this picture you can see the Activity in its current state: The tabs are being pushed in a second row.

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In the following picture you can see the Activity the way I want it to be: The tabs should be in the top row, not in a second row. I already read the ActionBar and ActionBarSherlock documentation, but found no way to force this behaviour.

This is the current code, used to create the ActionBar.

public class AdminActivity extends SherlockFragmentActivity {

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_admin);

    ActionBar actionBar = getSupportActionBar();
    actionBar.setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true);
    actionBar.setNavigationMode(ActionBar.NAVIGATION_MODE_TABS);

    ActionBar.Tab itemsTab = actionBar.newTab().setText(R.string.label_tab_items);
    ActionBar.Tab usersTab = actionBar.newTab().setText(R.string.label_tab_users);

    actionBar.addTab(itemsTab);
    actionBar.addTab(usersTab);
}

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There is a reflection ‘hack’ to do this. I take no credit for the solution, which I found in this StackOverflow question replicate ActionBar Tab(s) with custom view.

//pre-ICS
if (actionBarSherlock instanceof ActionBarImpl) {
    enableEmbeddedTabs(actionBarSherlock);

//ICS and forward
} else if (actionBarSherlock instanceof ActionBarWrapper) {
    try {
        Field actionBarField = actionBarSherlock.getClass().getDeclaredField("mActionBar");
        actionBarField.setAccessible(true);
        enableEmbeddedTabs(actionBarField.get(actionBarSherlock));
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e(TAG, "Error enabling embedded tabs", e);
    }
} 

//helper method
private void enableEmbeddedTabs(Object actionBar) {
    try {
        Method setHasEmbeddedTabsMethod = actionBar.getClass().getDeclaredMethod("setHasEmbeddedTabs", boolean.class);
        setHasEmbeddedTabsMethod.setAccessible(true);
        setHasEmbeddedTabsMethod.invoke(actionBar, true);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e(TAG, "Error marking actionbar embedded", e);
    }
}

See also this blog post: http://sparetimedev.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/forcing-embedded-tabs-in-actionbar.html