Best practice to place menu Icons on the left side of the navigation drawer in Persian,Hebrew devices?

Question

I am trying to have a navigation drawer that opens from the right. ( i managed to do that using LAYOUT_GRAVITY="END"). Now I want all the menu items to start from the right and also their Icons on the right too.

To do that I added (SUPPORTSRTL="TRUE") to the manifest and that also solved the problem. But here is the problem:

• if the device's language is set to English, everything works perfectly.
• But if the device's language is set to Persian(which is a RTL language) then everything else in the app will be right to left. That means what ever I put in the right goes to left and what ever that is set to the left goes to the right. I even tried using "start" and "end" instead of "right" and "left" but that didn't solve the problem.

To solve that I had to set the (LAYOUTDIRECTION="LTR") to the root element of layouts on every one of my actitives. That solved the problem and now everything is in the position I desired, however this doesn't seem like a sustainable solution to add this line of code to root element of each activity I will ever add to my app. Can you please tell me if this is the best way to do it or not?

I found other questions with the same topic with no accepted proper answers.

Answer 1

this line of code should solve your problem

    ViewCompat.setLayoutDirection(drawer, ViewCompat.LAYOUT_DIRECTION_RTL);

drawer is a reference to your DrawerLayout.

an other way to force RTL layout to activities is using styles xml. this is how i whould do it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.MaterialComponents.Light.NoActionBar">
    <!-- Customize your theme here. -->
    <item name="colorPrimary">@color/colorPrimary</item>
    <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/colorPrimaryDark</item>
    <item name="colorAccent">@color/colorAccent</item>

</style>

<style name="ShaliRTL" parent="AppTheme">
    <item name="android:layoutDirection">rtl</item>
</style>

</resources>

then in android manifest apply this new style (ShaliRTL) to your specific activity:

        <activity
        android:name=".YourActivity"
        android:label="@string/title_activity_settings"
        android:theme="@style/ShaliRTL"
        android:screenOrientation="fullSensor" />

good luck.