Let’s say we want to make it easy to share our deadline with friends. To do that, we’d like to have a button at the app bar at the top of the screen that opens the famous Share Menu when tapped. After selecting the app to use for sharing the deadline, that app is opened, ready to share the text:

“I have a deadline in just X hours! Help me procrastinate”

It turns out sharing text between apps in Android is really simple; just tell Android what we intend to do! To do so, we need to use an Intent.

  1. Go to MainActivity.java
  2. Find the code that calculates the number of hours left, and select all of it.
  3. Press Ctrl + Alt + M to refactor it into a method. The created method should not take any parameters, and should return a long.
  4. Create a new method to handle share button clicks. Inside this method, we create our Intent and give it to Android:``` public void onShareButtonClicked(MenuItem menuItem) { // We intend to send something Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND); // Here’s what we are trying to send intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, put the text to share here); // Just plain old boring text. intent.setType(“text/plain”); // Creates the panel that lets us choose app to share via Intent chooserIntent = Intent.createChooser(intent, “Share your deadline using…”); // Display the sharing panel startActivity(chooserIntent); }

We can’t use this method just yet – we need something to click on first! Let’s make our share action icon.

  1. Right-click the res folder and select “New” → “Vector asset”
  2. Find and select the share icon.
  3. Set the name to ic_action_share (this is just a convention, you can give it whatever name you want).
  4. Set the color to white.
  5. Click Next, then Finish.

Congratulations, you just created a vector icon that will look super-crisp on any device! Now include it in a menu:

  1. Right-click the res folder and select “New” → “Android resource file”
  2. Name the file main_menu and from the “Resource type” dropdown, select “Menu”.
  3. Click OK to create the menu.
  4. Drag a “Menu item” into the menu.
    • Set the ID of the item to action_share
    • Title should be “Share”
    • Icon should be the one we just created
    • For showAsAction select “always”
    • For onClick select our method onShareButtonClicked. Note: you might have to click “View all attributes” at the bottom to see this one.

If you run the app now, you might notice that there’s still no share button. That’s because we haven’t told Android to display our menu:

  1. In MainActivity, override the method onCreateOptionsMenu. The easiest way to do this is to just start typing the method name and accepting the suggestion.
  2. Use getMenuInflater().inflate to read main_menu.xml into the Menu object, and return true to tell Android that we want to display it. Hint: The integer argument is supposed to be a resource ID. You might have noticed that we used R.layout.activity_main when referencing our layout at the top of onCreate? That was actually an integer referencing our layout. Where do you think we might find our menu?

Now run the app and try sharing the deadline with your friends!

Note: In early versions of Android, there was no such thing as an app bar. There was a title at the top, period. The stuff we have in the app bar today used to be in a menu that was displayed when the user pressed a physical menu button.

Next: Icons and strings

LF