Is it possible to find the location of the soft button bars in Android?

Question

I am trying to locate the location of the soft button bar in Android (where instead of hardware back, menu etc. buttons, they are displayed on screen).

I know how to get the actual window size in pixels with something like

Display d = getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay();
DisplayMetrics realDisplayMetrics = new DisplayMetrics();
DisplayMetrics displayMetrics = new DisplayMetrics();

d.getRealMetrics(realDisplayMetrics);
d.getMetrics(displayMetrics);

... and then see if the "regular" display metrics compared with the "real" display metrics. Thus I know if the soft button bar is on the horizontal or vertical position (and how many pixels it is), but I don't know if it is on the left or on the right.

Any ideas how to retrieve that?

EDIT: The context of the code is inside an Activity (as asked).

Answer 1

The only reliable indicator of where system windows are (such as the status bar and navigation bar) is through the use of system window insets, as explained in the Why would I want to fitsSystemWindows blog post.

Prior to API 21, this required that your root view of your Activity be a subclass where you've overridden fitsSystemWindows() - the Rect passed to you tells you on which sides and at what sizes the status bar/navigation bar is (depending on what flags you have set on your activity).

However, on API 21+, you can instead do this without creating a custom view by using ViewCompat.setOnApplyWindowInsetsListener:

ViewCompat.setOnApplyWindowInsetsListener(yourRootView,
    new OnApplyWindowInsetsListener() {
      @Override
      public WindowInsetsCompat onApplyWindowInsets(View v, WindowInsetsCompat insets) {
        // Use insets.getSystemWindowInsetBottom(), etc to extract
        // the size and location of the system windows
        return ViewCompat.onApplyWindowInsets(v, insets);
      }
    });