Android ShareActionProvider does not provide share action without shareHistoryFileName set

TL;DR - It is compulsory to call setShareHistoryFileName() after initialising from getActionProvider().


I was trying to call the ShareActionProvider from a Contextual Action Bar. As it turned out, after trying to figure out why it didn't work on my Jelly Bean emulator, I found this issue that has had hardly any attention on it. Running the built-in ApiDemo (for API 10, on both the emulator and my actual device) proved that it really doesn't have anything catered for this action. Bottomline is, I had to switch to plugging in my own phone to test my change for this bit.

When the documentation mentioned "Defaults to DEFAULT_SHARE_HISTORY_FILE_NAME." my assumption was that I did not need to even call setShareHistoryFileName() since it's already set with that as default. Why shouldn't it? And without which, my share action fails to react, even when the icon is sitting nicely on the screen.

I only managed to find people asking how to disable the share history, but not this other bit. I don't really care for the share history in this case, but getting it to work without which seems impossible. Dear people at Google, maybe would you like to consider either stating that setShareHistoryFileName() must be called, to pass in the DEFAULT_SHARE_HISTORY_FILE_NAME, or maybe just plain set it in by default or to null if it was never set? Isn't that what built-in defaults are for?

Even though I know there are tons of codes floating around that's basically similar every which way, here's a snippet of my codes for posterity:

private ActionMode.Callback actionModeCallBack = new ActionMode.Callback() { ...
        @Override
        public boolean onCreateActionMode(ActionMode mode, Menu menu) {
            MenuInflater inflater = mode.getMenuInflater();
            inflater.inflate(R.menu.confirmed_context_menu, menu);
           
            shareAction = (ShareActionProvider) menu.findItem(R.id.share_confirmed).getActionProvider();
            shareAction.setShareHistoryFileName(ShareActionProvider.DEFAULT_SHARE_HISTORY_FILE_NAME);
            shareAction.setShareIntent(createShareIntent());
            return true;
        }

 I must qualify my lack of understanding was specifically for this bit of use for the ShareActionProvider in a contextual action bar that appears only after a long-press, but no where did I spot anybody mentioning that they succeeded in calling the Provider without setting the share history... or is everyone just copying the codes from documentation line-for-line?