Action Bar

The ActionBar is NativeScript’s abstraction over the Android ActionBar and iOS NavigationBar. It represents a toolbar at the top of the activity window, and can have a title, application-level navigation, as well as other custom interactive items.

Usage

The ActionBar provides a title property and can be extended by using one or more ActionItem components and a single NavigationButton.

<ActionBar title="ActionBar Title">
    <NavigationButton icon="res://ic_arrow_back_black_24dp" (tap)="goBack()"></NavigationButton>
    <ActionItem icon="font://&#xf013;" class="fas" ios.position="right" (tap)="openSettings()"></ActionItem>
</ActionBar> 

import { Component } from "@angular/core";
import { RouterExtensions } from "nativescript-angular/router";

@Component({
    moduleId: module.id,
    templateUrl: "./usage.component.html"

})
export class ActionBarUsageComponent {

    constructor(private routerExtensions: RouterExtensions) { }

    goBack() {
        this.routerExtensions.backToPreviousPage();
    }

    openSettings() {
        // implement the cusotm logic
    }
}

ActionItem

The ActionItem components are supporting the platform-specific position and systemIcon for iOS and Android.

<ActionBar title="Action Items">
    <ActionItem (tap)="onShare()" ios.systemIcon="9" ios.position="left"
                android.systemIcon="ic_menu_share" android.position="actionBar">
    </ActionItem>
    <ActionItem text="delete" (tap)="onDelete()"
                ios.systemIcon="16" ios.position="right" android.position="popup">
    </ActionItem>
</ActionBar>

• Android sets position via android.position:

  • actionBar: Puts the item in the ActionBar. Action item can be rendered both as text or icon.
  • popup: Puts the item in the options menu. Items will be rendered as text.
  • actionBarIfRoom: Puts the item in the ActionBar if there is room for it. Otherwise, puts it in the options menu.

• iOS sets position via ios.position:

  • left: Puts the item on the left side of the ActionBar.
  • right: Puts the item on the right side of the ActionBar.

NavigationButton

The NavigationButton component is a common abstraction over the iOS back button and the Android navigation button.

iOS Specifics: The default text of the navigation button is the title of the previous page. In iOS, the back button is used explicitly for navigation. It navigates to the previous page and you can't handle the tap event to override this behavior. If you want to place a button on the left side of the ActionBar and handle the tap event (e.g., show slide-out), you can use ActionItem with ios.position="left".

Android Specifics: In Android, you can't set text inside the navigation button. You can use the icon property to set an image (e.g., ~\images\nav-image.png or res:\\ic_nav). You can use android.systemIcon to set one of the system icons available in Android. In this case, there is no default behaviour for NavigationButton tap event, and we should define manually the callback function, which will be executed.

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Demo Source

Styling

To style the ActionBar, you can use only background-color and color properties. Alternatively, you can use @nativescript/theme and use the default styles for each different theme. The icon property of ActionItem can use Icon Fonts with the font:// prefix. By setting up this prefix, a new image will be generated, which will be set as an ActionItem's icon resource. While using this functionality, we need to specify the font-size, which will calculate the size of the generated image base on the device's dpi.

<!-- The default background-color and color of ActionBar & ActionItem are set through nativescript-theme (if used)-->
<ActionBar title="Styling">
      <!-- Explicitly hiding the NavigationBar to prevent the default one on iOS-->
      <NavigationButton visibility="collapsed"></NavigationButton>

      <!-- Using the icon property and Icon Fonts -->
      <ActionItem position="left" icon="font://&#xf0a8;" class="fas" (tap)="goBack()"></ActionItem>

      <!-- Creating custom views for ActionItem-->
      <ActionItem ios.position="right">
            <GridLayout width="100">
                  <Button text="Theme" class="-primary -rounded-lg"></Button>
            </GridLayout>
      </ActionItem>
</ActionBar>

Note: In iOS, the color property affects the color of the title and the action items. In Android, the color property affects only the title text. However, you can set the default color of the text in the action items by adding an actionMenuTextColor item in the Android theme (inside App_Resources\Android\values\styles.xml).

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Demo Source

Properties

ActionBar Properties

ActionItem Properties

NavigationButton Properties

Events

API References

Native Component

Detailed documentation article about ActionBar functionalities.