Question

On subclasses of View there is a getTag() method, which returns the android:tag attribute’s value from .xml.
I would like the same for a MenuItem… is it okay to just cast it to a View?
Because item elements also allow a tag attribute in .xml…

Update: My goal with this is setting a tag in .xml, i.e. "notranslate", and querying it at runtime (we localize by hand at runtime, don’t ask…)

Answer 1

MenuItem is an interface. Any class can implement this interface and so it will not always be safe to cast the MenuItem to a View. You can use the “instanceOf” operator to test to see if the object that implements the MenuItem interface is indeed a View or not.

I understand that you want to define a flag in the XML definition of the menu and then at run time interrogate that flag to make a programmatic decision.

The Menu Resource Documentation records what attributes can be set in the XML. You can consider using (abusing) one of those settings such as the “android:alphabeticShortcut” to encode the flag and use the MenuItem::getAlphabeticShortcut() method to get the value. This does not require casting – it just uses the existing fields in the MenuItem XML construct/class for your own purposes.

Perhaps a less hacky way to do this is to keep a simple table in a separate assets file that lists the menu item identifiers and the special behavior associated with that identifier such as to translate or not to translate.

Alternatively create a simple class that has a table with this configuration information hard coded using the logical “@[+][package:]id/resource_name” resource identifier as the keys to the table. While this doesn’t keep it all in one place (in the XML) it does it in a manner that is not encoding information in unused attributes, or relying on the ids not changing. The “table” could be implemented as a static method with an embedded switch statement allowing code such as “if (TranslationTable.shouldTranslate(menuItem.getItemId())) { do translation }”