Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android rolls out frequent updates to meet the demands of the dynamic mobile market and to enable its developer community to lead advancements in application development. This book focuses on the updated features of Android Studio (the fully integrated development environment launched by Google) to build reliable Android applications using Java. The book starts by outlining the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. You’ll then learn how to create user interfaces with the help of Android Studio Layout Editor, XML files, and by writing the code in Java. The book introduces you to Android architecture components and advanced topics such as intents, touchscreen handling, gesture recognition, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication, and lets you explore key features of Android Studio 4.0, including the layout editor, direct reply notifications, and dynamic delivery. You’ll also cover Android Jetpack in detail and create a sample app project using the ViewModel component. Finally, you’ll upload your app to the Google Play Console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the skills necessary to develop applications using Android Studio 4.0 and Java.
Table of Contents (88 chapters)
88
Index

42.6 Menus and the Android Studio Menu Editor

Android Studio allows menus to be designed visually simply by loading the menu resource file into the Menu Editor tool, dragging and dropping menu elements from a palette and setting properties. This considerably eases the menu design process, though it is important to be aware that it is still necessary to write the code in the onOptionsItemSelected() method to implement the menu behavior.

To visually design a menu, locate the menu resource file and double-click on it to load it into the Menu Editor tool. Figure 42-4, for example, shows the default menu resource file for a basic activity loaded into the Menu Editor in Design mode.

The palette (A) contains items that can be added to the menu contained in the design area (C). The Component Tree (B) is a useful tool for identifying the hierarchical structure of the menu. The Attributes panel (D) contains a subset of common attributes for the currently selected item. The view all attributes...