Toolbar and Contextual ActionBar with AppCompat-v7
Just a small addition: For
<item name="windowActionModeOverlay">true</item>
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState) BEFORE calling setContentView(R.layout.your_activity) in your activity.
It really makes a difference in this case!
Do not start it on your activity, but on your toolbar. In you activity:
Toolbar toolbar = (Toolbar) findViewById(R.id.toolbar);
toolbar.startActionMode(mActionModeCallback)
and you have to use
<item name="windowActionModeOverlay">true</item>
In my case,
<item name="windowActionModeOverlay">true</item>did not work,
but this work:<item name="android:windowActionModeOverlay">true</item>,the android is the key.
Update:
Solution: use the windowActionModeOverlay property. Set this in your theme:
<item name="windowActionModeOverlay">true</item>
and the actionmode will be shown over the action bar instead of pushing it down. (If you're not using the latest AppCompat then you need to add the "android:" prefix to the property). It basically lets AppCompat know that you have a toolbar located in the top of the screen and that it should draw the ActionMode on top of it.
Old answer/workaround:
I ran into the same problem. No matter what theme I set, it always pushes down the Toolbar I set as ActionBar. I tried with and without the support library, but it didn't matter.
Unfortunately I was not able to fix it so I have built a workaround instead. In my ActionModeCallback's onCreateActionMode I hide the action bar:
actionBarToolbar.setVisibility(View.GONE);
and in onDestroyActionModeI show it again:
actionBarToolbar.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
The hiding/showing happens so quickly it is not noticeable on my test devices. There is of course a downside: although the enter-animation still works, the exit-animation of the contextual action bar gets lost because the Toolbar immediately pops over it. But until we come across a better solution I guess we are stuck with this.
(My Activity is actually extending a custom BaseActivity class which has a method called getActionBarToolbar(), taken from the Google I/O 2014 app source code, so I can easily get fetch the Toolbar:
BaseActivity activity = (BaseActivity) getActivity();
activity.getActionBarToolbar().setVisibility(View.GONE);
Too bad the I/O app does not use the contextual action bar.)