Android Tutorial - Android Color-Drawable Resources

In Android, an image is one type of a drawable resource.

Android supports another drawable resource called a color-drawable resource, which is essentially a colored rectangle.

Example

To define a color rectangle, you define an XML element by the node name of drawable in any XML file in the /res/values subdirectory.

The following code shows a couple of color-drawable resource examples.

<resources>
    <drawable name="red_rectangle">#f00</drawable>
    <drawable name="blue_rectangle">#0000ff</drawable>
    <drawable name="green_rectangle">#f0f0</drawable>
</resources>

The following code shows how you can use a color-drawable resource in Java.


// Get a drawable
ColorDrawable redDrawable = (ColorDrawable)
         activity.getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.red_rectangle);

//Set it as a background to a text view
textView.setBackgroundDrawable(redDrawable);

Reference in resource

The following code shows how you can use a color-drawable resource in layout resource.

<resources>
    <drawable name="red_rectangle">#f00</drawable>
    <drawable name="blue_rectangle">#0000ff</drawable>
    <drawable name="green_rectangle">#f0f0</drawable>
</resources>

The following resource file references the defined color drawable defined above.

<TextView android:layout_width="fill_parent"
          android:layout_height="wrap_content"
          android:textAlign="center"
          android:background="@drawable/red_rectangle"/>