No ActionBar in PreferenceActivity after upgrade t

Question

After I upgraded to the Support Library v21 my ActionBar in my PreferenceActivity is gone.

Did I miss some attributes in my theme to activate it again? I had some similar trouble with a black ActionBar.

I also tried to add it a little hackish by adding a Toolbar to the root layout, but that did not work as expected.

Answer 1

Hi I am not if you still have this issue. But I figure I will post what I did to resolve this and hope it will help someone.

1) First off, you might have noticed that PreferenceActivity extends ListActivity which in turns extends from Activity.

According to the comments on the developers blog (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2014/10/appcompat-v21-material-design-for-pre.html), to use v21 all your activities must inherit from ActionBarActivity. So there is your issue.

2) The steps I used to resolve are :

a) Make sure that you set the Theme of your PreferenceActivity to inherits one ot the Theme.AppCompat Themes.

b) Make your class PreferenceActivity extends ActionBarActivity.

c) Use the PreferenceFragment as your container for all your preferences.

This should resolve it.

Cheers!

Answer 2

An easy way I figured out is overriding:

@android:style/Theme.Material.Light.DarkActionBar

In your style:

<style name="SettingsTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.Material.Light.DarkActionBar">
    <item name="android:colorPrimary">@color/sunshine_blue</item>
    <item name="android:colorPrimaryDark">@color/sunshine_dark_blue</item>
</style>

Answer 3

A better solution than "rolling your own" action bar is to use the AppCompatDelegate class, which lets you bring in an actual-factual action bar from the support library. Here is example code to use it, taken from Ľubomír Kučera's answer to this question.

...
import android.support.v7.app.ActionBar;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatDelegate;
import android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar;
...

public class SettingsActivity extends PreferenceActivity {

    private AppCompatDelegate mDelegate;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        getDelegate().installViewFactory();
        getDelegate().onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onPostCreate(savedInstanceState);
        getDelegate().onPostCreate(savedInstanceState);
    }

    public ActionBar getSupportActionBar() {
        return getDelegate().getSupportActionBar();
    }

    public void setSupportActionBar(@Nullable Toolbar toolbar) {
        getDelegate().setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
    }

    @Override
    public MenuInflater getMenuInflater() {
        return getDelegate().getMenuInflater();
    }

    @Override
    public void setContentView(@LayoutRes int layoutResID) {
        getDelegate().setContentView(layoutResID);
    }

    @Override
    public void setContentView(View view) {
        getDelegate().setContentView(view);
    }

    @Override
    public void setContentView(View view, ViewGroup.LayoutParams params) {
        getDelegate().setContentView(view, params);
    }

    @Override
    public void addContentView(View view, ViewGroup.LayoutParams params) {
        getDelegate().addContentView(view, params);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostResume() {
        super.onPostResume();
        getDelegate().onPostResume();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onTitleChanged(CharSequence title, int color) {
        super.onTitleChanged(title, color);
        getDelegate().setTitle(title);
    }

    @Override
    public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
        super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
        getDelegate().onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onStop() {
        super.onStop();
        getDelegate().onStop();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onDestroy() {
        super.onDestroy();
        getDelegate().onDestroy();
    }

    public void invalidateOptionsMenu() {
        getDelegate().invalidateOptionsMenu();
    }

    private AppCompatDelegate getDelegate() {
        if (mDelegate == null) {
            mDelegate = AppCompatDelegate.create(this, null);
        }
        return mDelegate;
    }
}

Answer 4

I ended in adding the Toolbar myself with this simple code:

// get the root container of the preferences list
LinearLayout root = (LinearLayout)findViewById(android.R.id.list).getParent().getParent().getParent();
Toolbar bar = (Toolbar)LayoutInflater.from(this).inflate(R.layout.preferences_toolbar, root, false);
root.addView(bar, 0); // insert at top
bar.setNavigationOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        finish();
    }
});

Here is my preferences_toolbar.xml:

<android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:minHeight="?attr/actionBarSize"
    app:navigationContentDescription="@string/abc_action_bar_up_description"
    android:background="?attr/colorPrimary"
    app:navigationIcon="?attr/homeAsUpIndicator"
    app:theme="@style/Theme.Toolbar" />

Answer 5

Use AppCompatActivity & PreferenceFragment to solve the issue:

AppCompatActivity:

public class SettingsActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

@Override
protected void onPostCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onPostCreate(savedInstanceState);
    getFragmentManager().beginTransaction().replace(android.R.id.content, new SettingsFragment()).commit();
}}

PreferenceFragment:

public class SettingsFragment extends PreferenceFragment {

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.settings_preferences);
}}

Answer 6

I did something similar to accepted question, but I'm using my layout in other activities as well (MainActivity too), so I cannot just hard-code an arrow in it.

What worked for me:

private void setupActionBar() {
    LinearLayout root = (LinearLayout)findViewById(android.R.id.list).getParent().getParent().getParent();
    Toolbar toolbar = (Toolbar)LayoutInflater.from(this).inflate(R.layout.app_bar, root, false);
    root.addView(toolbar, 0);
    setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
    ActionBar ab = getSupportActionBar();
    ab.setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true);
}