Proper way to handle action bar up button?

Question

I use ActionBarSherlock (although I don't think it matters).

I have a Main activity and an About activity. I want the About activity to show the back-arrow by its logo, and do the proper animation and such. I don't know how to do this properly.

Currently, I have under onOptionsMenuItemSelected to launch the Main activity when the Up/Home button is pressed, but it's hacky and doesn't really work right. It plays the wrong animation, and handles multitasking poorly.

How do I set this up right?

Here's the part in my Main activity that launches the About:

Intent aboutIntent = new Intent(MainActivity.this, About.class); MainActivity.this.startActivity(aboutIntent); 

Here's my About activity:

package com.stevenschoen.test;  import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle;  import com.actionbarsherlock.app.SherlockActivity; import com.actionbarsherlock.view.MenuItem;  public class About extends SherlockActivity {     public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {         super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);         setContentView(R.layout.about);          getSupportActionBar().setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true);         getSupportActionBar().setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false);     }      public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {         switch (item.getItemId()) {              case android.R.id.home:                 // app icon in action bar clicked; go home                 Intent intentHome = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);                 intentHome.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP);                 startActivity(intentHome);                 return true;              default:                 return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);         }     } } 

Answer 1

Have you also tried this (taken from Android website here) :

in the manifest, for each activity X that needs to go to the main activity, add this to the code:

@Override public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {     switch (item.getItemId()) {     // Respond to the action bar's Up/Home button     case android.R.id.home:         NavUtils.navigateUpFromSameTask(this);         return true;     }     return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item); } 

and this to its manifest xml tag:

<meta-data android:name="android.support.PARENT_ACTIVITY" android:value="com.activities.MainActivity" /> 

if you need to still have the same state on the main activity, use this code instead :

Intent intent = NavUtils.getParentActivityIntent(this);  intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP|Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP);  NavUtils.navigateUpTo(this, intent); 

if the API is 16 or above, you can add an attribute of parentActivityName with the path to the main activity instead of the metadata .