Action-bar — sub menu item with text and image not working properly

Question

I am developing small Android application in which I am using action bar with some menu items. One menu item contains sub menu. Now what I want to do is to display menu item with text and icon always.

I define menu items in following manner.

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >

    <item
        android:id="@+id/card_menu"
        android:icon="@drawable/abc"
        android:showAsAction="withText|always"
        android:title="cards">

        <menu>

            <item
                android:id="@+id/C1"
                android:title="C1"/>

            <item
                android:id="@+id/C2"
                android:title="c2"/>

            <item
                android:id="@+id/C3"
                android:title="C3"/>
        </menu>
    </item>

    <item
        android:id="@+id/notification"
        android:actionLayout="@layout/notification_icon"
        android:icon="@drawable/notification"
        android:showAsAction="always"
        android:title="Notifications"/>

    <item
        android:id="@+id/filter"
        android:icon="@drawable/filter"
        android:showAsAction="always"
        android:title="Filter"/>

</menu>

Now what happens is my action-bar displays my items properly; only thing is that when window is in portrait mode it shows only image, and when window is in landscape mode it shows image and text both. But I want image and text in both mode.

How to do that? Is there any way to solve this?

Answer 1

If you are using the ActionBar from the Android Sopport Library (android.support.v7.app.ActionBar), you might need to change your menu and item declaration from:

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >

<item
    android:id="@+id/notification"
    android:actionLayout="@layout/notification_icon"
    android:icon="@drawable/notification"
    android:showAsAction="always"
    android:title="Notifications"/>

to

<!-- Your menu -->
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:yourappname="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto" >


<!-- Your item to be shown as action-->    
<item
    android:id="@+id/notification"
    android:actionLayout="@layout/notification_icon"
    android:icon="@drawable/notification"
    android:showAsAction="always"
    yourappname:showAsAction="always"
    android:title="Notifications"/>

I had a similar problem when providing the compatibility to older android versions.