android-drawerlayout.md

title: Android's DrawerLayout tags: android,android-drawerlayout

If you want a drawer layout, you need to have layout like so. A DrawerLayout, with two children, the first being the content and the second being the drawer. The layout_gravity tells us what side to launch the drawer from.

<android.support.v4.widget.DrawerLayout
    android:id="@+id/drawer"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent">
    <FrameLayout
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent">
        <TextView
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="match_parent"
            android:text="hi"/>
    </FrameLayout>
    <FrameLayout
        android:layout_width="240dp"
        android:layout_gravity="start"
        android:layout_height="match_parent">
        <TextView
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="match_parent"
            android:text="there"/>
    </FrameLayout>
</android.support.v4.widget.DrawerLayout>

Then in your onCreate, first set our swish new Toolbar to be the actionbar, second set a DrawerToggle and set that to the toolbar, third set the drawer layout to listen to the drawer toggle.

setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
DrawerLayout = (DrawerLayout) findViewById(R.id.drawer);
mDrawerToggle = new ActionBarDrawerToggle(this, mDrawer, toolbar,
        R.string.drawer_open, R.string.drawer_close);
mDrawerLayout.setDrawerListener(mDrawerToggle);
mDrawerToggle.syncState();

The final line ensure we actually see the toggle.

There's various syncing and actions to be done on opening the drawer, but that's the minimum.

Finally, onOptionsItemSelected must have the code to actually open the drawer once on the toolbar toggle has been set.

if (mDrawerToggle.onOptionsItemSelected(item)) {
    return true;
}