Take a look in the API: Prepare the Screen’s standard options menu to be displayed. This is called right before the menu is shown, every time it is shown. You can use this method to efficiently enable/disable items or otherwise dynamically modify the contents.
Be wary of invalidateOptionsMenu(). It recreates the entire menu. This has a lot of overhead and will reset embedded components like the SearchView. It took me quite a while to track down why my SearchView would “randomly” close. I ended up capturing the menu as posted by Dark and then call onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu) as necessary. This … Read more
For anyone needs to change the options of the menu dynamically: private Menu menu; // … @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { this.menu = menu; getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.options, menu); return true; } // … private void hideOption(int id) { MenuItem item = menu.findItem(id); item.setVisible(false); } private void showOption(int id) { MenuItem item = menu.findItem(id); item.setVisible(true); } private … Read more