Android Action Bar with Search View

Question

I want to do an action bar that looks like this:

and I am not able to do this.

I tried to use that collapse thing described here, but it is not exactly what i want.

• First of all SearchView isn't visible till user press search icon.. but I want It to be visible immediately after activity starts.
• Secondly after SearchView appears all other action icons disappear.. But I want them to be visible all the time.
• And it works only for android 3 and higher, I want it for android 2 and higher, so I am using ActionBarSherlock.

For example action bar in google maps looks similar to what I want.

Can somebody advise me how to achieve this?

Answer 1

ActionbarSherlock is a great library. The latest(4.2.0) release has the method to make you search view visible when the activity starts SearchView.setIconified(boolean);

So if you want to make your search view always visible you should use the following code:

@Override
public void onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu, MenuInflater inflater) {

    //Create the search view
    SearchView searchView = new SearchView(getSherlockActivity().getSupportActionBar().getThemedContext());
    searchView.setQueryHint("Search for countries…");
    searchView.setIconified(false);

    menu.add("Search")
            .setIcon(R.drawable.abs__ic_search)
            .setActionView(searchView)
            .setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_ALWAYS);


}