How can I refresh the ActionBar when onPrepareOptionsMenu switched menu entries?

Question

Within my apps I often enable/disable menu entries and do make them visible from onPrepareOptionsMenu.

Today I started to add the android:showAsAction menu attribute

Answer 1

I am not sure you have seen it already, but if you use the actionbar extensively, and plan on supporting lower API's (>8), take a look at the actionBarSherlock library. It will make it so you do not have to section your actionBar code for lower and Higher API's, and then you can just run:

runOnUiThread(new Runnable(){
  @Override
  public void run(){
    supportInvalidateOptionsMenu();
  }
});