Same Navigation Drawer in different Activities

Question

I made a working navigation drawer like it\'s shown in the tutorial on the developer.android.com website. But now, I want to use one Navigation Drawer, i created in the Navi

Answer 1

So this answer is a few years late but someone may appreciate it. Android has given us a new widget that makes using one navigation drawer with several activities easier.

android.support.design.widget.NavigationView is modular and has its own layout in the menu folder. The way that you use it is to wrap xml layouts the following way:

1. Root Layout is a android.support.v4.widget.DrawerLayout that contains two children: an for the layout that is being wrapped (see 2) and a android.support.design.widget.NavigationView.

nav_header_main is just a LinearLayout with orientation = vertical for the header of your Navigation Drawar.

activity_main_drawer is a menu xml in your res/menu directory. It can contain items and groups of your choice. If you use the AndroidStudio Gallery the wizard will make a basic one for you and you can see what your options are.

2. App bar layout is usually now a android.support.design.widget.CoordinatorLayout and this will include two children: a android.support.design.widget.AppBarLayout (which contains a android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar) and an for your actual content (see 3).

3. Content layout can be whatever layout you want. This is the layout that contains the main content of the activity (not including the navigation drawer or app bar).

Now, the cool thing about all of this is that you can wrap each activity in these two layouts but have your NavigationView (see step 1) always point to activity_main_drawer (or whatever). This means that you will have the same(*) Navigation Drawer on all activities.

• They won't be the same instance of NavigationView but, to be fair, that wasn't possible even with the BaseActivity solution outlined above.