android tutorial - Adding a toolbar in android | Developer android - android app development - android studio - android app developement

A Toolbar is a generalization of ActionBar for use within application layouts. While an ActionBar is traditionally part of an Activity's opaque window decor controlled by the framework, a Toolbar may be placed at any arbitrary level of nesting within a view hierarchy. It can be added by performing the following steps:

Make sure the following dependency is added to your module's (e.g. app's) build.gradle file under dependencies:

compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:25.3.1'

Set the theme for your app to one that does not have an ActionBar. To do that, edit your styles.xml file under res/values, and set a Theme.AppCompat theme. In this example we are using Theme.AppCompat.NoActionBar as parent of your AppTheme:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.NoActionBar">
    <item name="colorPrimary">@color/primary</item>
    <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/primaryDark</item>
    <item name="colorAccent">@color/accent</item>
</style>

You can also use Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar or Theme.AppCompat.DayNight.NoActionBar, or any other theme that does not inherently have an ActionBar

Add the Toolbar to your activity layout:

<android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar
    android:id="@+id/toolbar"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="?attr/actionBarSize"
    android:background="?attr/colorPrimary"
    android:elevation="4dp"/>

Below the Toolbar you can add the rest of your layout.

In your Activity, set the Toolbar as the ActionBar for this Activity. Provided that you're using the appcompat library and an AppCompatActivity, you would use the setSupportActionBar() method:

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

    final Toolbar toolbar = (Toolbar) findViewById(R.id.toolbar);
    setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
 
    //...
} 

After performing the above steps, you can use the getSupportActionBar() method to manipulate the Toolbar that is set as the ActionBar. For example, you can set the title as shown below:

getSupportActionBar().setTitle("Activity Title");

For example, you can also set title and background color as shown below:

CharSequence title = "Your App Name";
SpannableString s = new SpannableString(title);
s.setSpan(new ForegroundColorSpan(Color.RED), 0, title.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
getSupportActionBar().setTitle(s);
getSupportActionBar().setBackgroundDrawable(new ColorDrawable(Color.argb(128, 0, 0, 0)));