Remove Android options menu in XE5 Delphi

Question

Is there a way to completely remove the Android options menu in XE5 Delphi? I've been testing my application on a HTC One and because my phone doesn't have a menu button and my application doesn't have an options button, android automatically adds a options menu. Since this button is added by Android there is no way to add items to the menu.

I've already tried to change the minimal SDK version, but this makes the application very unstable and makes it crash when the orientation is changed:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="14" />

Is there an other way to remove the options menu? Now there is just a large options menu in the bottom of my screen that has no menu items.

Answer 1

Ok, you're right in that this empty action overflow menu is added because of your lack of hardware menu button.

On a Nexus 7 it's not such an issue as the empty overflow menu is added at the end of the other soft buttons.

On a HTC One, however, you can configure the Home button to act as a menu button, which removes the action overflow button.

It's not correct to say you can't add items to the menu. My Android session at CodeRage 8 shows how to add menu items. However, I'll grant you, it's a bit of a faff.

In order to remove it, the docs say you should set the targetSdkVersion attribute (not minSdkVersion) in your Android manifest to 14 (see this blog post for details). However having tried this it causes a crash if you don't prevent rotation in the RTM version of XE5, as you saw with your tests. This issue is sat in QC, logged some weeks back, hopefully to receive a fix in the near future.

However you should consider restricting the rotation as one course of action...... This is easy enough.

Answer 2

you must change in manifest android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden"> to: android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden|screenSize">

then you can set minsdk, maxsdk, targetsdk as you want, and application will not crash