How do I hide a menu item in the actionbar?

Question

I have an action bar with a menuitem. How can I hide/show that menu item?

This is what I'm trying to do:

MenuItem item = (MenuItem) findViewById(R.id.addAction); item.setVisible(false); this.invalidateOptionsMenu(); 

Answer 1

Get a MenuItem pointing to such item, call setVisible on it to adjust its visibility and then call invalidateOptionsMenu() on your activity so the ActionBar menu is adjusted accordingly.

Update: A MenuItem is not a regular view that's part of your layout. Its something special, completely different. Your code returns null for item and that's causing the crash. What you need instead is to do:

MenuItem item = menu.findItem(R.id.addAction); 

Here is the sequence in which you should call: first call invalidateOptionsMenu() and then inside onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu) obtain a reference to the MenuItem (by calling menu.findItem()) and call setVisible() on it

Answer 2

Found an addendum to this question:

If you want to change the visibility of your menu items on the go you just need to set a member variable in your activity to remember that you want to hide the menu and call invalidateOptionsMenu() and hide the items in your overridden onCreateOptionsMenu(...) method.

//anywhere in your code ... mState = HIDE_MENU; // setting state invalidateOptionsMenu(); // now onCreateOptionsMenu(...) is called again ...  @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {     // inflate menu from xml     MenuInflater inflater = getSupportMenuInflater();     inflater.inflate(R.menu.settings, menu);      if (mState == HIDE_MENU)     {         for (int i = 0; i < menu.size(); i++)             menu.getItem(i).setVisible(false);     } } 

In my example I've hidden all items.