actionlayout on menuitem does nothing

The answer from Ben Harris is absolutely correct. However, in some case like when using attributes like:

      app:showAsAction="ifRoom|collapseActionView"

used in SearchView (in my case), the layout view isn't shown and that caused a lot of headache to me. It seems that collapseActionView is not supported with action view in appcombat. So consider this as well while doing your stuffs.

when using Appcompact ,menu item will be like

<item android:id="@+id/cart"
    app:actionLayout="@layout/actionbar_cart"
    android:title="@string/action_cart"
    app:showAsAction="always"
 />

Try app:actionLayout="@layout/check" instead of android:actionLayout="@layout/check".

If you're using ActionbarSherlock or AppCompat, the android: namespace will not work for MenuItems. This is because these libraries use custom attributes that mimic the Android APIs since they did not exist in earlier versions of the framework.