Is there any way to catch the onkeydown event of the hardware menu button when using the SupportActionBar and the v7 support Toolbar?

Question

My AppCompatActivity axml uses the Android.Support.v7.Widget.Toolbar and the Activity sets the toolbar with SetSupportActionBar(toolbar);. Everything works as expected, however I'd like to override the OnKeyDown event of the whole activity to prevent a hardware button click. It appears that SupportActionBar (just an ActionBar) consumes the event for the hardware menu button and so the OnKeyDown of the activity never catches the menu button click.

I've tried overriding the Toolbar view and its OnKeyDown event, but the SupportActionBar consumes this event too.

My work around was to add a menu item that looks like the Overflow Menu icon and opens a popup in OnOptionsItemSelected. However, this is not ideal.

Answer 1

You can override onKeyDown / onKeyUp handlers in your Activity.

@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, final KeyEvent event) {
    if( keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_MENU ) {
        return true; // Ignore the keypress
    }
    return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

@Override
public boolean onKeyUp(int keyCode, final KeyEvent event) {
    if( keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_MENU )
        return true; // Ignore the keypress
    }
    return super.onKeyUp(keyCode, event);
}