Set selected item in Android BottomNavigationView

For those, who still use SupportLibrary < 25.3.0

I'm not sure whether this is a complete answer to this question, but my problem was very similar - I had to process back button press and bring user to previous tab where he was. So, maybe my solution will be useful for somebody:

private void updateNavigationBarState(int actionId){
    Menu menu = bottomNavigationView.getMenu();

    for (int i = 0, size = menu.size(); i < size; i++) {
        MenuItem item = menu.getItem(i);
        item.setChecked(item.getItemId() == actionId);
    }
}

Please, keep in mind that if user press other navigation tab BottomNavigationView won't clear currently selected item, so you need to call this method in your onNavigationItemSelected after processing of navigation action:

@Override
public boolean onNavigationItemSelected(@NonNull MenuItem item) {
    switch (item.getItemId()) {
        case R.id.some_id_1:
            // process action
            break;
        case R.id.some_id_2:
            // process action
            break;
        ...
        default:
            return false;
    }

    updateNavigationBarState(item.getItemId());

    return true;
}

Regarding the saving of instance state I think you could play with same action id of navigation view and find suitable solution.

bottomNavigationView.setSelectedItemId(R.id.action_item1);

where action_item1 is menu item ID.

To programmatically click on the BottomNavigationBar item you need use:

View view = bottomNavigationView.findViewById(R.id.menu_action_item);
view.performClick();

This arranges all the items with their labels correctly.

From API 25.3.0 it was introduced the method setSelectedItemId(int id) which lets you mark an item as selected as if it was tapped.

From docs:

Set the selected menu item ID. This behaves the same as tapping on an item.

Code example:

BottomNavigationView bottomNavigationView;
bottomNavigationView = (BottomNavigationView) findViewById(R.id.bottomNavigationView);
bottomNavigationView.setOnNavigationItemSelectedListener(myNavigationItemListener);
bottomNavigationView.setSelectedItemId(R.id.my_menu_item_id);

IMPORTANT

You MUST have already added all items to the menu (in case you do this programmatically) and set the Listener before calling setSelectedItemId(I believe you want the code in your listener to run when you call this method). If you call setSelectedItemId before adding the menu items and setting the listener nothing will happen.