Options Menu

To display the options menu for your activity, you need to override two methods – onCreateOptionsMenu() and onOptionsItemSelected(). The onCreateOptionsMenu() method is called when the MENU button is pressed. In this event, you would call the CreateMenu() helper method to display the options menu. When a menu item is selected, the onOptionsItemSelected() method will be called. In this case, you call the MenuChoice() method to display the menu item selected (and do whatever you need to do):

public class MenuExample extends Activity
{    
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 
    {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
 
        setContentView(R.layout.menu);        
    }
 
    private void CreateMenu(Menu menu)
    {
        //...
    }
 
    private boolean MenuChoice(MenuItem item)
    {        
        //...
    }    
 
    //---only created once---
    @Override
    public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
        super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
        CreateMenu(menu);
        return true;
    }
 
    @Override
    public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item)
    {    
         return MenuChoice(item);    
    }
 
}

Modify the ViewsActivity.java file as follows to start the MenuExample activity:

package net.learn2develop.AndroidViews;
 
import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.content.Intent;
 
public class ViewsActivity extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
 
        startActivity(new Intent(this, MenuExample.class));
    }
}

Press F11 to debug the application. When you press the MENU key, you will see the options menu as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - Displaying a options menu in your application

Observe the icons displayed for menu item 1, 2 and 3. Also, if the options menu has more than six items, there will be a More menu item to represent the additional menu items. The right of Figure 3-24 shows pressing the More item displays the additional menu items as a list.