Question

I’m looking through the ActionBarSherlock samples demo, and I see that the List Navigation and the Tab Navigation both make use of the ActionBar’s setNavigationMode method. This tells me that you can only have one or the other. If I want the user to have list navigation to move around between activities but I want some activities to have tabs, is there a different way to add tabs than via navigation mode? Is it against ActionBar design guidelines to use both? I don’t look at tabs and consider this to be a navigation feature, so I find it odd that you get one or the other.

Answer 1

This tells me that you can only have one or the other

Correct. Bear in mind that with action bar tabs, Android will convert you to list navigation, on its own, in certain configurations, whether you like it or not.

If I want the user to have list navigation to move around between activities but I want some activities to have tabs, is there a different way to add tabs than via navigation mode?

You can use a ViewPager with PagerTabStrip or the tab flavor of ViewPagerIndicator.

Or, you can go retro and use TabHost and TabWidget.

Is it against ActionBar design guidelines to use both?

The design guidelines refer to them as separate options for “View Controls”. More importantly, given the automatic conversion of tab navigation to list navigation, it would be seriously confusing for the action bar to have two Spinners’ worth of navigation choices.