How to update a menu item shown in the ActionBar?

Question

I have an Activity that has 2 fragments. Both are ListFragments and both contribute MenuItems to the Menu. I have one MenuItem that I've set the attribute android:showAsAction to have it show as a button on the ActionBar. Which works fine.

Now the MenuItem is state dependent. It's a Pause/Resume menu option for pausing and resuming a queue. My problem is I can't figure out how to set it's initial statue when the Fragment is created.

It's state is dependent on the whether the queue is paused or not. So I have an AsyncTask that gets the queue and sets a boolean (paused) based on the state of the queue. I'm calling onPrepareOptionsMenu to set the text for the Pause menu item based on the last known state of the queue and this works great if I leave the MenuItem in the actual menu. You tap the menu icon and onPrepareOptionsMenu is fired and the menu is updated before it's displayed.

The problem is, if I put that same MenuItem on the ActionBar (showAsAction), how can I force it to update without having to call onPrepareOptionsMenu? I need to be able to do this because on first launch of the app, I send a request to get the queue, but the task returns after the ActionBar is setup and displayed. I've created a handler in my fragment that gets called every time I get a queue update, but from there, how can I update the text for my MenuItem on the ActionBar? I can't seem to find a way to get the currently set Menu to manipulate it except for in onPrepareOptionMenu.

Rob W.

Answer 1

Option #1: Try invalidateOptionsMenu(). I don't know if this will force an immediate redraw of the action bar or not.

Option #2: See if getActionView() returns anything for the affected MenuItem. It is possible that showAsAction simply automatically creates action views for you. If so, you can presumably enable/disable that View.

I can't seem to find a way to get the currently set Menu to manipulate it except for in onPrepareOptionMenu.

You can hang onto the Menu object you were handed in onCreateOptionsMenu(). Quoting the docs:

You can safely hold on to menu (and any items created from it), making modifications to it as desired, until the next time onCreateOptionsMenu() is called.