Setting background colour of Android layout element
I am trying to, somewhat clone the design of an activity from a set of slides on Android UI design. However I am having a problem with a very simple task.
I have created the layout as shown in the image, and the header is a TextView in a RelativeLayout. Now I wish to change the background colour of the RelativeLayout, however I cannot seem to figure out how.
I know I can set the android:background property in the RelativeLayout tag in the XML file, but what do I set it to? I want to define a new colour that I can use in multiple places. Is it a drawable or a string?
Additionally I would expect there to be a very simple way to this from within the Eclipse Android UI designer that I must be missing?
I am a bit frustrated currently, as this should be an activity that is performed with a few clicks at maximum. So any help is very appreciated. :)
Answer
You can use simple color resources, specified usually inside res/values/colors.xml.
<color name="red">#ffff0000</color>
and use this via android:background="@color/red". This color can be used anywhere else too, e.g. as a text color. Reference it in XML the same way, or get it in code via getResources().getColor(R.color.red).
You can also use any drawable resource as a background, use android:background="@drawable/mydrawable" for this (that means 9patch drawables, normal bitmaps, shape drawables, ..).