SearchView in OptionsMenu not full width

Question

I have a working SearchView which expands in my OptionsMenu when the user taps on the search icon. However it only expands within the available space among the other OptionsMenu icons. On a wide screen this is fine, but with a narrow space there is only room to show 5-10 charaters in the search box. I want it to overlay the other icons such as it does for the Android Contacts app. Currently, I'm building with targetSdkVersion = 17. Hopefully I'm missing something simple :)

(Note added later: the only solution I've found workable so far is to hide all the menu icons when I want to expand the search icon. This is conceptually simple. But it is messy because when restoring hidden icons, one has to go through a bunch of logic to figure out which ones to restore, or keep state variables around, etc.)

Here's my item xml in for the OptionsMenu:

<item   android:id="@+id/menu_search_shallow"   android:title="Search Current Folder"   android:icon="@drawable/ic_btn_search"   android:showAsAction="always|collapseActionView"   android:actionViewClass="android.widget.SearchView" /> 

I also have in my main activity code:

@Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu (Menu menu) {   getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.nav_menu, menu);   this.optionsMenu = menu;    MenuItem searchItem = menu.findItem (R.id.menu_search_shallow);   searchItem.setOnActionExpandListener (this);   SearchView searchView = (SearchView) searchItem.getActionView();   searchView.setQueryHint (getString (R.string.search_shallow_hint));    searchItem = menu.findItem (R.id.menu_search_deep);   searchItem.setOnActionExpandListener (this);   searchView = (SearchView) searchItem.getActionView();   searchView.setQueryHint (getString (R.string.search_deep_hint)); } 

and

@Override public boolean onMenuItemActionExpand(MenuItem item)  {   SearchView searchView = (SearchView) item.getActionView();   searchView.setOnQueryTextListener (this);   return true; }  @Override public boolean onMenuItemActionCollapse(MenuItem item)  {   SearchView searchView = (SearchView) item.getActionView();   searchView.setQuery ("", false);   return true; } 

Answer 1

Instead of creating a new layout I set the MaxWidth programmatically in onCreateOptionsMenu():

@Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {     MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();     inflater.inflate(R.menu.menu_search, menu);     SearchView searchView = (SearchView)menu.findItem(R.id.menu_search).getActionView();     searchView.setMaxWidth(Integer.MAX_VALUE);     .... 

Answer 2

For some reason jjung's solution didn't work for me. I had to add android:maxWidth="10000dp", just a really high maxWidth, to get it to expand to the full available width.

Also, just to add, I'm using the support library (v7), and so my layout file looks like this:

<android.support.v7.widget.SearchView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"     android:layout_width="match_parent"     android:layout_height="wrap_content"     android:maxWidth="10000dp" /> 

And in my item, I have:

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"     xmlns:myapp="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">     <item         ...         myapp:actionLayout="@layout/searchview" /> ... 

Where myapp is just some arbitrary namespace for the attributes added by the support library (see Adding Action Items for more details).