Android how to get AppCompat.Translucent type theme with support actionbar?

I would like to add the support actionbar to one of my activities, I previously had been using the theme.translucent with this activity but in order to make the support actionbar work I needed to inherit the Theme.AppCompat, I need to maintain a translucent theme in this activity but unfortunately there isnt a Theme.AppCompat.translucent that i can see by default, is there any way that this can be done?

You can create a new set of styles to use which have the same properties as Theme.Translucent from themes.xml.

Add the following to your styles.xml file:

<style name="Theme.AppCompat.Translucent">
    <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@android:color/transparent</item>
    <item name="android:colorBackgroundCacheHint">@null</item>
    <item name="android:windowIsTranslucent">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowAnimationStyle">@android:style/Animation</item>
</style>

You can change the prefix Theme.AppCompat to something else if you want to inherit other things from the theme such as dialog styles etc. For example, a name like Theme.AppCompat.Light.Translucent would have the properties of the Light theme.

To use the new style, set the theme property to @style/Theme.AppCompat.Translucent

<activity
    android:name=".TranslucentActivity"
    android:theme="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Translucent" >
</activity>

Parama ,

<style name="Theme.AppCompat.Translucent" parent="Theme.AppCompat.NoActionBar">
        <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
        <item name="android:windowBackground">@android:color/transparent</item>
        <item name="android:colorBackgroundCacheHint">@null</item>
        <item name="android:windowIsTranslucent">true</item>
        <item name="android:windowAnimationStyle">@android:style/Animation</item>
    </style>

This should be the style header if you want the toolbar to disappear.you can use any parent theme which has NoActionBar for other effects.

Hope this helps

If we use Translucent for transparent activity. It raises other issues - the color of Msgbox (now white previously black), Default dialog color, the spinners do drop down but do not show the underline and drop-down arrow. The spinners are color black text black; drop-down white drop-down text black and etc. To overcome this problem, you can just use below code

In style

<style name="Theme.AppCompat.Transparent.NoActionBar" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">
    <item name="android:windowIsTranslucent">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@android:color/transparent</item>
 <item name="android:windowContentOverlay">@null</item>
    <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowIsFloating">false</item>
    <item name="android:backgroundDimEnabled">false</item>
</style>

In manifest file

<activity
        android:name=".activity.YourActivityName"
        android:theme="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Transparent.NoActionBar" />

I hope it will help Thanks

Cameron's answer is a nice hack , but it produced a floating action bar and tinted my status bar, which i didn't wanted . So i added more xml attributes for making status bar transparent(for sdk >=19) and used java code for making action bar invisible.

mainActivity.java :

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
        getSupportActionBar().hide();
     ...
    }
     ...
}

styles.xml

<style name="AppTheme.TranslucentBG">
    <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@android:color/transparent</item>
    <item name="android:colorBackgroundCacheHint">@null</item>
    <item name="android:windowIsTranslucent">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowAnimationStyle">@android:style/Animation</item>

    <item name="android:windowTranslucentStatus">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowTranslucentNavigation">true</item>
    
</style>

manifest.xml

<application
    android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
    ...
    android:theme="@style/AppTheme"
    ...
    >


    <activity android:name=".MainActivity"
        android:theme="@style/AppTheme.TranslucentBG"
        ...
        >
        ...
    </activity>
</application>