android - How to force use of overflow menu on devices with menu button

Question

I'd like to have all of the menu items that don't fit into the ActionBar go into the overflow menu (the one that is reached from the Action Bar not the menu button) even on devices that do have a Menu button. This seems much more intuitive for users than throwing them into a separate menu list that requires the user to jump from a touch(screen) interaction to a button based interaction simply because the layout of the ActionBar can't fit them on the bar.

On the emulator I can set the "Hardware Back/Home Keys" value to "no" and get this effect. I've searched for a way to do this in code for an actual device that has a menu button but can't fine one. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

You can also use this little hack here:

try {
    ViewConfiguration config = ViewConfiguration.get(this);
    Field menuKeyField = ViewConfiguration.class.getDeclaredField("sHasPermanentMenuKey");
    if (menuKeyField != null) {
        menuKeyField.setAccessible(true);
        menuKeyField.setBoolean(config, false);
    }
} catch (Exception ignored) {
}

Good place to put it would be the onCreate-Method of your Application class.

It will force the App to show the overflow menu. The menu button will still work, but it will open the menu in the top right corner.

[Edit] Since it has come up several times now: This hack only works for the native ActionBar introduced in Android 3.0, not ActionBarSherlock. The latter uses its own internal logic to decide whether to show the overflow menu. If you use ABS, all platforms < 4.0 are handled by ABS and are thus subjected to its logic. The hack will still work for all devices with Android 4.0 or greater (you can safely ignore Android 3.x, since there aren't really any tablets out there with a menu button).

There exists a special ForceOverflow-Theme that will force the menu in ABS, but apperently it is going to be removed in future versions due to complications.