Posted on April 19, 2017 in Development

Adding Menu Items in Navigation Drawer Dynamically

Introduction

Android Studio provides support to add Navigation Drawer Activity from IDE itself. With such Activity, it automatically generates menu items for navigation drawer in form of a xml file resource located inside res/menu directory. By default, this xml file is named activity_main_drawer.xml, and contains menu items statically like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

    <group android:checkableBehavior="single">
        <item
            android:id="@+id/nav_camera"
            android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_camera"
            android:title="Import" />
        <item
            android:id="@+id/nav_gallery"
            android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_gallery"
            android:title="Gallery" />
        <item
            android:id="@+id/nav_slideshow"
            android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_slideshow"
            android:title="Slideshow" />
        <item
            android:id="@+id/nav_manage"
            android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_manage"
            android:title="Tools" />
    </group>

    <item android:title="Communicate">
        <menu>
            <item
                android:id="@+id/nav_share"
                android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_share"
                android:title="Share" />
            <item
                android:id="@+id/nav_send"
                android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_send"
                android:title="Send" />
        </menu>
    </item>

</menu>

What if you want to generate or add more menu items dynamically ? If you're like me, then you would not want to have support to add menu items without making changes in static file. One reason for doing so is to be able to read new menu items data from remote servers and generate UI on the fly. In other words, automating UI generation !

Actually, its pretty simple to do so !

Show me code

Here’s code that’s responsible for generating new menu items on the fly.

private void addMenuItemInNavMenuDrawer() {
    NavigationView navView = (NavigationView) findViewById(R.id.nav_view);

    Menu menu = navView.getMenu();
    Menu submenu = menu.addSubMenu("New Super SubMenu");

    submenu.add("Super Item1");
    submenu.add("Super Item2");
    submenu.add("Super Item3");

    navView.invalidate();
}

Call addMenuItemInNavMenuDrawer in onCreate() method before launching your app.

@Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

        ....

        NavigationView navigationView = (NavigationView) findViewById(R.id.nav_view);
        navigationView.setNavigationItemSelectedListener(this);

        addMenuItemInNavMenuDrawer();
    }

And that's pretty much it !

Before Adding New Submenu

Here's how Navigation drawer looks like before adding new sub menu.

After Adding New Submenu

Here's Navigation Drawer after adding brand new submenu.

You can checkout source code at github here