MenuItem tinting on AppCompat Toolbar

Question

When I use drawables from the AppCompat library for my Toolbar menu items the tinting works as expected. Like this:

Answer 1

Most of the solutions in this thread either use a newer API, or use reflection, or use intensive view lookup to get to the inflated MenuItem.

However, there's a more elegant approach to do that. You need a custom Toolbar, as your "apply custom tint" use case does not play well with public styling/theming API.

public class MyToolbar extends Toolbar {
    ... some constructors, extracting mAccentColor from AttrSet, etc

    @Override
    public void inflateMenu(@MenuRes int resId) {
        super.inflateMenu(resId);
        Menu menu = getMenu();
        for (int i = 0; i < menu.size(); i++) {
            MenuItem item = menu.getItem(i);
            Drawable icon = item.getIcon();
            if (icon != null) {
                item.setIcon(applyTint(icon));
            }
        }
    }
    void applyTint(Drawable icon){
        icon.setColorFilter(
           new PorterDuffColorFilter(mAccentColor, PorterDuff.Mode.SRC_IN)
        );
    }

}

Just make sure you call in your Activity/Fragment code:

toolbar.inflateMenu(R.menu.some_menu);
toolbar.setOnMenuItemClickListener(someListener);

No reflection, no view lookup, and not so much code, huh?

And now you can ignore the ridiculous onCreateOptionsMenu/onOptionsItemSelected.