How to force use of overflow menu on devices with menu button

Question

I\'d like to have all of the menu items that don\'t fit into the ActionBar go into the overflow menu (the one that is reached from the Action Bar not the menu button) ev

Answer 1

If you use Toolbar, you can show the overflow on all versions and all devices, I've tried on some 2.x devices, it works.

Answer 2

In the gmail app that comes with ICS pre-installed, the menu button is disabled when you have multiple items selected. The overflow menu is here "forced" to be triggered by the use of the overflow button instead of the physical menu button. Theres a 3rd-party lib called ActionBarSherlock which lets you "force" the overflow menu. But this will only work on API level 14 or lower(pre-ICS)

Answer 3

You can also use this little hack here:

try {
    ViewConfiguration config = ViewConfiguration.get(this);
    Field menuKeyField = ViewConfiguration.class.getDeclaredField("sHasPermanentMenuKey");
    if (menuKeyField != null) {
        menuKeyField.setAccessible(true);
        menuKeyField.setBoolean(config, false);
    }
} catch (Exception ignored) {
}

Good place to put it would be the onCreate-Method of your Application class.

It will force the App to show the overflow menu. The menu button will still work, but it will open the menu in the top right corner.

[Edit] Since it has come up several times now: This hack only works for the native ActionBar introduced in Android 3.0, not ActionBarSherlock. The latter uses its own internal logic to decide whether to show the overflow menu. If you use ABS, all platforms < 4.0 are handled by ABS and are thus subjected to its logic. The hack will still work for all devices with Android 4.0 or greater (you can safely ignore Android 3.x, since there aren't really any tablets out there with a menu button).

There exists a special ForceOverflow-Theme that will force the menu in ABS, but apperently it is going to be removed in future versions due to complications.

Answer 4

If you are using the action bar from the support library (android.support.v7.app.ActionBar), use the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:yorapp="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto" >

    <item
        android:id="@+id/menu_overflow"
        android:icon="@drawable/icon"
        yourapp:showAsAction="always"
        android:title="">
        <menu>
            <item
                android:id="@+id/item1"
                android:title="item1"/>
            <item
                android:id="@+id/item2"
                android:title="item2"/>
        </menu>
    </item>

</menu>

Answer 5

For anyone using the new Toolbar:

private Toolbar mToolbar;

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle bundle) {
    super.onCreate(bundle);

    mToolbar = (Toolbar) findViewById(R.id.toolbar);
    setSupportActionBar(mToolbar);

    ...
}


@Override
public boolean onKeyUp(int keycode, KeyEvent e) {
    switch(keycode) {
        case KeyEvent.KEYCODE_MENU:
            mToolbar.showOverflowMenu();
            return true;
        }

    return super.onKeyUp(keycode, e);
}