How can I refresh the ActionBar when onPrepareOptionsMenu switched menu entries?

Question

Within my apps I often enable/disable menu entries and do make them visible from onPrepareOptionsMenu.

Today I started to add the android:showAsAction menu attribute

Answer 1

Based on "Klaasvaak" answer above. I am using its subMenus. This works for me :

// Declare and save the menu as global, so it can be called anywhere.
Menu absTopSubMenus;

public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {

absTopSubMenus = menu;  // Used for re-drawing this menu anywhere in the codes.

// The remainder of your code below
}

Then, to re-draw this, just call :

// Redraw the top sub-menu
absTopSubMenus.clear();
onCreateOptionsMenu(absTopSubMenus);

Answer 2

save a reference to the menu and call:

this.menu.clear();
this.onCreateOptionsMenu(this.menu);

Answer 3

You can now use supportInvalidateOptionsMenu() method from the ActionbarActivity with the support library. So you don't have to check for the version of the sdk. Goes until API 7 and above.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/app/ActionBarActivity.html

do to so, you have to import the v7 of the support library using this

http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/setup.html

Answer 4

Use

ActivityCompat.invalidateOptionsMenu(Activity activity)

from the compatibility library.

See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14748687/435855