Android: How can I set a listener to the MenuButton?

Question

I want to do a custom action when pressing on the Menu button on the phone.

Is it possible to set an onClickListener (or similar) on the button and if s

Answer 1

You could probably hack something in using "OnMenuOpened" or some such, but I really wouldn't recommend it. The menu button is only supposed to be used to show menus, so there is consistency between applications.

Answer 2

Updated for AppCompat v.22.+

As mentioned in this forum, KeyDown is not called for KEYCODE_MENU button pressed.

The solution is to override dispatchKeyEvent to this way:

@Override
public boolean dispatchKeyEvent(KeyEvent event) {
    int keyCode = event.getKeyCode();
    int action = event.getAction();
    boolean isDown = action == KeyEvent.ACTION_DOWN;

    if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_MENU) {
        return isDown ? this.onKeyDown(keyCode, event) : this.onKeyUp(keyCode, event);
    }

    return super.dispatchKeyEvent(event);
}

@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {

    if ( keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_MENU ) {
        // do what you want to do here
        return true;
    }

    return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

It works until Google developers release a fix for this (or maybe it is not a bug and it works this way from now on).

Answer 3

Usually you shouldn't override MENU behavior as users expect menu to appear, however you can use something along these lines:

/* (non-Javadoc)
 * @see android.app.Activity#onKeyDown(int, android.view.KeyEvent)
 */
@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
    if ( keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_MENU ) {
        Log.d(TAG, "MENU pressed");
        return true;
    }
    return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

Answer 4

But onPrepareOptionsMenu(..) is called each time. :)