Question

There’s a question for the same functionality on Blackberry, and a few different threads referred to this bug (which has since been closed without resolution as far as I can tell), but I haven’t found one specifically for Android.

I’m calling setEnabled(false) on certain MenuItems based on some state, but they visually look the same. I’d like them to be offset in some way, so that the user knows that the option currently isn’t available — is there any way to do that?

Answer 1

I had the same issue. There are two ways of getting this to work:

1. Put your icons in a StateList so that a different icon will be used on disable

2. What I use now. Change the icon yourself with something like this in onPrepareOptionsMenu():

   public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
       boolean menusEnabled = reachedEndOfSlidehow(); // enable or disable?
       MenuItem item = menu.findItem(R.id.menu_next_slide);
       Drawable resIcon = getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.ic_next_slide);
   
       if (!menusEnabled)
           resIcon.mutate().setColorFilter(Color.GRAY, PorterDuff.Mode.SRC_IN);
   
       item.setEnabled(menusEnabled); // any text will be automatically disabled
       item.setIcon(resIcon);
   }
   

You can call invalidateOptionsMenu() (or from ABS, supportInvalidateOptionsMenu()) to rebuild the menu.

EDIT: Updated solution 2

Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/actionbarsherlock/Z8Ic8djq-3o