The PopupMenu class was introduced in Android 3 to add support for displaying popup menus that are attached to a particular view. The following illustration shows a popup menu presented from a button, with the second item highlighted just as it is selected:

Android 4 adds a couple of new features to PopupMenu that make it a bit easier to work with, namely:

• Inflate - The Inflate method is now available directly on the PopupMenu class.
• DismissEvent - The PopupMenu class now has a DismissEvent.

Let’s take a look at these improvements. In this example, we have a single Activity that contains a button. When the user clicks the button, a popup menu is displayed as shown below:

Creating a Popup Menu

When we create an instance of the PopupMenu, we need to pass its constructor a reference to the Context, as well as the view to which the menu is attached. In this case, we create the PopupMenu in the click event handler for our button, which is named showPopupMenu. This button is also the view to which we’ll attach the PopupMenu, as shown in the following code:

showPopupMenu.Click += (s, arg) => {
    PopupMenu menu = new PopupMenu (this, showPopupMenu);
}

In Android 3, the code to inflate the menu from an XML resource required that you first get a reference to a MenuInflator, and then call its Inflate method with the resource ID of the XML that contained the menu and the menu instance to inflate into. Such an approach still works in Android 4 as the code below shows:

showPopupMenu.Click += (s, arg) => {
    PopupMenu menu = new PopupMenu (this, showPopupMenu);
    menu.MenuInflater.Inflate (Resource.Menu.popup_menu, menu.Menu);
};

As of Android 4 however, you can now call Inflate directly on the instance of the PopupMenu. This makes the code more concise as shown here:

showPopupMenu.Click += (s, arg) => {
    PopupMenu menu = new PopupMenu (this, showPopupMenu);
    menu.Inflate (Resource.Menu.popup_menu);
    menu.Show ();
};

In the code above, after inflating the menu we simply call menu.Show to display it on the screen.

Handling Menu Events

When the user selects a menu item, the MenuItemClick event will be raised and the menu will be dismissed. Tapping anywhere outside the menu will simply dismiss it. In either case, as of Android 4, when the menu is dismissed, its DismissEvent will be raised. The following code adds event handlers for both the MenuItemClick and DismissEvent events:

showPopupMenu.Click += (s, arg) => {
    PopupMenu menu = new PopupMenu (this, showPopupMenu);
    menu.Inflate (Resource.Menu.popup_menu);

    menu.MenuItemClick += (s1, arg1) => {
        Console.WriteLine ("{0} selected", arg1.Item.TitleFormatted);
    };

    menu.DismissEvent += (s2, arg2) => {
        Console.WriteLine ("menu dismissed");
    };
            menu.Show ();
};