Convert an old style Android menu to work on newer phones

Question

My old app has one simple menu on the main activity. It has only a few simple options, for instance "About" causing a popup with some info about the app.

It works perfectly on emulator Nexus One (API23), because there is an emulated physical menu button.

However, on most modern phones, there is no button, which means that my menus cannot be accessed.

I actually vaguely remember running it on a phone years ago which didn't have a menu button, yet somehow one could still access the menus. I may remember wrong.

(I started digging into this some days ago, and started modifying my code, the main activity inheriting from something more posh than Activity, which then caused some older API versions to be left out - and things quickly spun out of control. After hours of "maven gradle settings" and "Support Library" stuff and many pages of "AAPT2 errors" and messing up my whole system trying to fix that, I had to throw everything away and get a fresh clone from the repo. Fortunately I could also repair the other changes I had made to the system.)

How does one convert an old-style app menu to work on modern phones? It doesn't have to be fancy.

/** Setup menu */
@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
    MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();
    inflater.inflate(R.menu.main, menu);
    return true;
}
/** Handle menu clicks */
@Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
    // Handle item selection
    switch (item.getItemId()) {
        case R.id.action_about:
            final SpannableString s = 
            new SpannableString(getApplicationContext().getText(R.string.about));
            Linkify.addLinks(s, Linkify.ALL);
            AlertDialog d = new AlertDialog.Builder(this)
            .setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_dialog_info)
            .setTitle("About")
            .setMessage(s)
            //.setView(message)
            .show();
            ((TextView)d.findViewById(android.R.id.message)).setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());
            return true;
        default:
            new AlertDialog.Builder(this)
            .setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_dialog_info)
            .setTitle("Currently not used.")
            .show();
            return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
    }
}

I'll admit that I no longer understand all the details above from years ago.. it worked, so I never paid it much attention. It looks a bit wordy... probably there are simpler ways to do it.

This is menu/main.xml

    <menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
    <item
        android:id="@+id/action_settings"
        android:orderInCategory="100"
        android:title="@string/action_settings"/>
   <item
        android:id="@+id/action_about"
        android:orderInCategory="3"
        android:title="About"/>
    <item
        android:id="@+id/action_manual"
        android:orderInCategory="4"
        android:title="Manual"/>
    </menu>

Maybe there is some "theme" to just add somewhere that makes the menu button show up somewhere on the screen, and that's that? (I know I am optimistic. :))

Answer 1

SOLUTION:

The only way to a solution that I could find was to create a completely new project with default settings in the latest Android Studio. This gives a "latest fashion" setup. Then I moved code in from the old project manually.

Everything now works perfectly!

ISSUES / REASONS:

As mentioned in the comment section above, every attempt I made to modernize the code resulted in a maze of problems. It was an old project, from way back when Android Studio was not even in Beta stage. Hence, it was based on Eclipse. The current Android version back then was Jelly Bean (Kitkat was just released).

In summary, we had an ancient project based on an older IDE. Perhaps it would be doable to convert a modern Eclipse project into Android Studio. Perhaps it would be doable to convert an older AS project into a modern one. However, performing both these major jumps at the same time was too great a challenge for me.

Another issue which has nothing to do with the old code, but which confused the matter greatly is that something called AAPT2 currently for whatever reason assumes american characters only in the search path to the .gradle directory. I use the word "assumes", because if the characters are anything else, you get pages of errors in the build log. None of the errors point very clearly to the reason.

AFAIK I don't even use AAPT2! After some sleepless nights, I solved it by changing the global setting in Android Studio to simply use another path.