How to get ActionBar view?

Question

I'm using the Showcase library to explain my application feature to the user. In some point I need to dim the whole ActionBar to present another feature to the user.

For that I'm using the setAlpha(float num) of the View class. And so for doing that I need to get the actual view instance of my ActionBar

By the way, I'm using the support-7-appcompat library that gives ActionBar support for older systems.

Update

In the meantime I found this option, if you configure a custom view and add it to you ActionBar using:

getSupportActionBar().setCustomView(v); 

Then to get the View of the ActionBar you could do:

(View) activity.getSupportActionBar().getCustomView().getParent().getParent() 

Is there a simpler or easier way to do that?

Answer 1

Yep. You can actually get the view by using this function:

public View getActionBarView() {     Window window = getWindow();     View v = window.getDecorView();     int resId = getResources().getIdentifier("action_bar_container", "id", "android");     return v.findViewById(resId); } 

Pretty much the way this works is that the actionbar container uses the id android.R.id.action_bar_container, but this id is not public. Therefore we use getIdentifier() to retrieve this id and then the rest is simple.

Answer 2

I think this solution is more complete, handling both normal Activity and ActionBarActivity.

It also handles the case that the actionbar was set using a toolbar, but you need to implement it in the activity you've created:

public static View getActionBarView(final Activity activity) {     if (activity instanceof IToolbarHolder)         return ((IToolbarHolder) activity).getToolbar();     final String packageName = activity instanceof ActionBarActivity ? activity.getPackageName() : "android";     final int resId = activity.getResources().getIdentifier("action_bar_container", "id", packageName);     final View view = activity.findViewById(resId);     return view; }  public interface IToolbarHolder {     public android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar getToolbar(); }