Change the color of a checked menu item in a navigation drawer

Question

I am using the new Android Design Support library to implement a navigation drawer in my application.

I can't figure out how to change the color of a selected item!

Here is the xml of the menu :

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<group android:checkableBehavior="single">
    <item
        android:id="@+id/navigation_item_1"
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_1"
        android:title="@string/navigation_item_1"/>

    <item
        android:id="@+id/navigation_item_2"
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_2"
        android:title="@string/navigation_item_2"/>
</group>

And here is the navigationview xml which is placed inside a android.support.v4.widget.DrawerLayout :

<android.support.design.widget.NavigationView
    android:id="@+id/activity_main_navigationview"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:layout_gravity="start"
    app:headerLayout="@layout/drawer_header"
    app:itemIconTint="@color/black"
    app:itemTextColor="@color/primary_text"
    app:menu="@menu/menu_drawer">

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/main_activity_version"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_gravity="bottom"
        android:layout_marginBottom="@dimen/activity_vertical_margin"
        android:layout_marginLeft="@dimen/activity_horizontal_margin"
        android:textColor="@color/primary_text" />

</android.support.design.widget.NavigationView>

Thank you for your help !

[EDIT] I have already looked at solutions such as this one : Change background color of android menu.

It seems to be quite a hack and I thought that with the new Design Support Library, something cleaner would have been introduced?

Answer 1

Well you can achieve this using Color State Resource. If you notice inside your NavigationView you're using

app:itemIconTint="@color/black"
app:itemTextColor="@color/primary_text"

Here instead of using @color/black or @color/primary_test, use a Color State List Resource. For that, first create a new xml (e.g drawer_item.xml) inside color directory (which should be inside res directory.) If you don't have a directory named color already, create one.

Now inside drawer_item.xml do something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:color="checked state color" android:state_checked="true" />
    <item android:color="your default color" />
</selector>

Final step would be to change your NavigationView

<android.support.design.widget.NavigationView
    android:id="@+id/activity_main_navigationview"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:layout_gravity="start"
    app:headerLayout="@layout/drawer_header"
    app:itemIconTint="@color/drawer_item"  // notice here
    app:itemTextColor="@color/drawer_item" // and here
    app:itemBackground="@android:color/transparent"// and here for setting the background color to tranparent
    app:menu="@menu/menu_drawer">

Like this you can use separate Color State List Resources for IconTint, ItemTextColor, ItemBackground.

Now when you set an item as checked (either in xml or programmatically), the particular item will have different color than the unchecked ones.