Android - Notification bar height from a service

Question

Hi,

The application I'm working on is a service which runs in the background in android. The problem is that I need to determine the height of the notification bar for some functionality of the service.

I found a number of solutions for this, for regular activities - a view inside an activity can determine its own height without the notification bar, based on checking its actual view size from its onSizeChanged event, after it is already drawn. However, this is not applicable to a service which has no physical view drawn.

I would really appreciate any ideas on getting the size of the notification bar at a system level, perhaps?

Thanks so much!

Vitaliy

Answer 1

Have an activity tell your service the proper size to use. The status bar height, nor the screen size, is likely to change during the operation of your service.

Answer 2

Maybe you can retrieve an standard notification bar icon and measure it.

You'll have to use a system icon so you have more chances to be present on all Android customizations (Sense UI, MotoBlur, etc...)

Something like:

Drawable phoneCallIcon = getResources().getDrawable(android.R.drawable.stat_sys_phone_call);

int height = phoneCallIcon.getIntrinsicHeight();

Running this from my Nexus One gives 38 pixels height, which is accurate.

---

A safer approach to this 'hack' would be iterating through some of the standard notification icons.

It would be this way:

int notificationBarResources[] = {
            android.R.drawable.stat_sys_phone_call,
            android.R.drawable.stat_notify_call_mute,
            android.R.drawable.stat_notify_sdcard,
            android.R.drawable.stat_notify_sync,
            android.R.drawable.stat_notify_missed_call,
            android.R.drawable.stat_sys_headset,
            android.R.drawable.stat_sys_warning };
int notificationBarHeight = -1;
    for (int i = 0; i < notificationBarResources.length; i++) {
        try {
            Drawable phoneCallIcon = getResources().getDrawable(
                    android.R.drawable.stat_sys_phone_call);
            if ((notificationBarHeight = phoneCallIcon.getIntrinsicHeight()) != -1) {
                break;
            }
        } catch (Resources.NotFoundException e) {
            // Nothing to do
        }
    }

Answer 3

Thanks xamar!

I'm still looking for a more general alternative, but in the meantime your workaround is the best one!

For some reason I can't mark it as an answer here..

Thanks again so much for your help!

I would still appreciate a more general approach, If someone could think of. I really can't believe that there is no API to get the notifications' bar height in Android..

Thanks! Vitaliy

Answer 4

I have the same problem. My view lays out images in the view constructor. The only time you know the actual view height is on the onMesure method by doing:

   protected void onMeasure (int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
    super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);
    widthView = MeasureSpec.getSize(widthMeasureSpec);
    heightView = MeasureSpec.getSize(heightMeasureSpec);
   }

However I can't lay out the images inside this method (animation of the images will keep calling this method).

To know the actual height of the view I would need to do:

screenHeight - statusBarHeight

so I could use this value on the constructor of the view.

I can't believe it has to be so complex to provide a solution for such a simple requirement.

Answer 5

Yeah - thanks Xamar - been searching the net for ages trying to get this. Why isn't it an obvious in the Android SDK? Really wierd....