Question

I’m working with an existing Android app and I need to have a dynamically editable pop-up menu or something functionally equivalent. I want the menu to appear at the bottom of the screen or the top (out of the way, the user needs to see what is going on with the screen). That menu will display information, not options to select, based on what the user changes on the screen.

My current attempts include using menuinflater to get a menu xml file to the bottom of the screen, which works, but I can’t dynamically edit the names of the items in the xml file while the app is running.

Any thoughts on how I could accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can go about this in a number of ways.

• First you could use an Activity with a dialog theme.
• Second you could create a dialog view hierarchy and use View.setVisibility(View.GONE) etc… to hide and reveal views.
• Third you could just create new dialogs based on what the user does (if they are not changed too frequently).
• Fourth you could create a new custom view that will allow you to implement completely custom actions and control features for the dialog.
• Fifth you could use a SurfaceView and write an OpenGL ‘mini’ application to run in the dialog (I am a huge fan of this one).