ProgressBar in an ActionBar, like GMail app with Refresh

Question

I would like to do the same thing than the GMail application on Honeycomb tablets. When you click on the Refresh button, the icon is replaced by a ProgressBar. How can I do this

Answer 1

Gmail does this using an action view for its "refresh in progress" state. Invoking a refresh is done using the standard action button/onMenuItemSelected path.

When you enter your refreshing state, set the action view of the refresh MenuItem to a ProgressBar. (Create it programmatically, inflate it from a layout, use actionLayout in the menu xml as CommonsWare suggests, whatever you prefer.) When you exit your refreshing state, set the action view back to null while keeping a reference to it so you can set it back again the next time you refresh. You can hang onto a reference to the MenuItem after you inflate the menu and changes to it later will be reflected in the action bar.

This approach has some advantages over using a full-time action view and managing other details of the state change yourself. An action view completely replaces the generated action button for a menu item, effectively blocking the user from being able to send the usual onMenuItemSelected events for refresh while a refresh is already in progress. One less thing to handle and the action view can stay completely non-interactive.

You could probably do something clever with an ActionProvider in API 14+ to encapsulate the whole process a bit more but the above ends up being pretty simple.