What Is an App Drawer on Android

Navigation Drawer in Android

The navigation drawer is the most common feature offered by android and the navigation drawer is a UI panel that shows your app's main navigation menu. It is also one of the important UI elements, which provides actions preferable to the users like example changing user profile, changing settings of the application, etc. In this article, it has been discussed step by step to implement the navigation drawer in android.

The navigation drawer slides in from the left and contains the navigation destinations for the app.

The user can view the navigation drawer when the user swipes a finger from the left edge of the activity. They can also find it from the home activity by tapping the app icon in the action bar. The drawer icon is displayed on all top-level destinations that use a DrawerLayout. Have a look at the following image to get an idea about the Navigation drawer.

Steps to Implement Navigation Drawer in Android

Step 1: Create an Android Studio Project

• Create an empty activity android studio project.
• Refer to Android | How to Create/Start a New Project in Android Studio? on how to create an empty activity android studio project. Note that we are going to implement this project using theJava language.

Step 2: Adding a dependency to the project

• In this discussion, we are going to use the Material design Navigation drawer.
• So add the following Material design dependency to the app-level Gradle file.

implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.3.0-alpha03'

• Refer to the following image if unable to locate the app-level Gradle file invokes the dependency (under project hierarchy view).
• After invoking the dependency click on the " Sync Now " button. Make sure the system is connected to the network so that Android Studio downloads the required files.

Step 3: Creating a menu in the menu folder

• Create the menu folder under the res folder. To implement the menu.
• Refer to the following video to create the layout to implement the menu.

• Invoke the following code in the navigation_menu.xml

XML

<? xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8" ?>

tools:ignore = "HardcodedText" >

< item

android:id = "@+id/nav_account"

android:title = "My Account" />

< item

android:id = "@+id/nav_settings"

android:title = "Settings" />

< item

android:id = "@+id/nav_logout"

android:title = "Logout" />

</ menu >

Step 4: Working with the activity_main.xml file

• Invoke the following code in the activity_main.xml to set up the basic things required for the Navigation Drawer.

XML

<? xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8" ?>

< androidx.drawerlayout.widget.DrawerLayout

android:id = "@+id/my_drawer_layout"

android:layout_width = "match_parent"

android:layout_height = "match_parent"

tools:context = ".MainActivity"

tools:ignore = "HardcodedText" >

< LinearLayout

android:layout_width = "match_parent"

android:layout_height = "match_parent" >

< TextView

android:layout_width = "match_parent"

android:layout_height = "wrap_content"

android:layout_marginTop = "128dp"

android:gravity = "center"

android:text = "GeeksforGeeks"

android:textSize = "18sp" />

</ LinearLayout >

< com.google.android.material.navigation.NavigationView

android:layout_width = "wrap_content"

android:layout_height = "match_parent"

android:layout_gravity = "start"

app:menu = "@menu/navigation_menu" />

</ androidx.drawerlayout.widget.DrawerLayout >

Output UI:

• One thing to be noticed is that the menu drawer icon is still not appeared on the action bar. We need to set the icon and its open-close functionality programmatically.

Step 5: Include the Open Close strings in the string.xml

• Invoke the following code in the styles.xml file.

XML

< resources >

< string name = "app_name" >Navigation Drawer</ string >

< string name = "nav_open" >Open</ string >

< string name = "nav_close" >Close</ string >

</ resources >

Step 6: Working with the MainActivity.java file

• Invoke the following code in the MainActivity.java file to show the menu icon on the action bar and implement the open-close functionality of the navigation drawer.
• Comments are added inside the code for better understanding.

Java

import androidx.annotation.NonNull;

import androidx.appcompat.app.ActionBarDrawerToggle;

import androidx.appcompat.app.AppCompatActivity;

import androidx.drawerlayout.widget.DrawerLayout;

import android.os.Bundle;

import android.view.MenuItem;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

public DrawerLayout drawerLayout;

public ActionBarDrawerToggle actionBarDrawerToggle;

@Override

protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super .onCreate(savedInstanceState);

setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

drawerLayout = findViewById(R.id.my_drawer_layout);

actionBarDrawerToggle = new ActionBarDrawerToggle( this , drawerLayout, R.string.nav_open, R.string.nav_close);

drawerLayout.addDrawerListener(actionBarDrawerToggle);

actionBarDrawerToggle.syncState();

getSupportActionBar().setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled( true );

}

@Override

public boolean onOptionsItemSelected( @NonNull MenuItem item) {

if (actionBarDrawerToggle.onOptionsItemSelected(item)) {

return true ;

}

return super .onOptionsItemSelected(item);

}

}

Output: Run on Emulator

What Is an App Drawer on Android

Source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/navigation-drawer-in-android/