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. :)

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, ..).

The above answers are nice.You can also go like this programmatically if you want

First, your layout should have an ID. Add it by writing following +id line in res/layout/*.xml

<RelativeLayout ...
...
android:id="@+id/your_layout_id"
...
</RelativeLayout>

Then, in your Java code, make following changes.

RelativeLayout rl = (RelativeLayout)findViewById(R.id.your_layout_id);
rl.setBackgroundColor(Color.RED);

apart from this, if you have the color defined in colors.xml, then also you can do programmatically :

rl.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(getContext(), R.color.red));

You can use android:background="#DC143C", or any other RGB values for your color. I have no problem using it this way, as stated here

The

res/values/colors.xml.

<color name="red">#ffff0000</color>
android:background="@color/red"

example didn't work for me, but the

android:background="#(hexidecimal here without these parenthesis)"

worked for me in the relative layout element as an attribute.

If you want to change a color quickly (and you don't have Hex numbers memorized) android has a few preset colors you can access like this:

android:background="@android:color/black"

There are 15 colors you can choose from which is nice for testing things out quickly, and you don't need to set up additional files.

Setting up a values/colors.xml file and using straight Hex like explained above will still work.

4 possible ways, use one you need. ##1. Kotlin

val ll = findViewById<LinearLayout>(R.id.your_layout_id)
ll.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.white))

##2. Data Binding

<LinearLayout
    android:background="@{@color/white}"

OR more useful statement-

<LinearLayout
    android:background="@{model.colorResId}"

##3. XML

<LinearLayout
    android:background="#FFFFFF"

<LinearLayout
    android:background="@color/white"

##4. Java

LinearLayout ll = (LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.your_layout_id);
ll.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.white));

Android studio 2.1.2 (or possibly earlier) will let you pick from a color wheel:

I got this by adding the following to my layout:

android:background="#FFFFFF"

Then I clicked on the FFFFFF color and clicked on the lightbulb that appeared.

Kotlin

linearLayout.setBackgroundColor(Color.rgb(0xf4,0x43,0x36))

or

<color name="newColor">#f44336</color>

-

linearLayout.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(vista.context, R.color.newColor))

The answers above all are static. I thought I would provide a dynamic answer. The two files that will need to be in sync are the relative foo.xml with the layout and activity_bar.java which corresponds to the Java class corresponding to this R.layout.foo.

In foo.xml set an id for the entire layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/foo" .../>

And in activity_bar.java set the color in the onCreate():

public class activity_bar extends AppCompatActivty {

	@Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
	    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
	    setContentView(R.layout.foo);
	
            //Set an id to the layout
	    RelativeLayout currentLayout = 
                    (RelativeLayout) findViewById(R.id.foo);
	
		currentLayout.setBackgroundColor(Color.RED);
        ...
    }
    ...
}

I hope this helps.