Question

I have an android app on which, when the user taps a TextView, I would like to apply a defined style.

I thought to find a textview.setStyle() but it doesn’t exists. I tried

textview.setTextAppearance();

but it does not work.

Answer 1

I did this by creating a new XML file res/values/style.xml as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>

    <style name="boldText">
        <item name="android:textStyle">bold|italic</item>
        <item name="android:textColor">#FFFFFF</item>
    </style>

    <style name="normalText">
        <item name="android:textStyle">normal</item>
        <item name="android:textColor">#C0C0C0</item>
    </style>

</resources>

I also have an entries in my “strings.xml” file like this:

<color name="highlightedTextViewColor">#000088</color>
<color name="normalTextViewColor">#000044</color>

Then, in my code I created a ClickListener to trap the tap event on that TextView:
EDIT:
As from API 23 ‘setTextAppearance’ is deprecated

    myTextView.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
                public void onClick(View view){
                    //highlight the TextView
                    //myTextView.setTextAppearance(getApplicationContext(), R.style.boldText);
    if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT < 23) {
       myTextView.setTextAppearance(getApplicationContext(), R.style.boldText);
    } else {
       myTextView.setTextAppearance(R.style.boldText);
    }
     myTextView.setBackgroundResource(R.color.highlightedTextViewColor);
                }
            });

To change it back, you would use this:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT < 23) {
    myTextView.setTextAppearance(getApplicationContext(), R.style.normalText);
} else{
   myTextView.setTextAppearance(R.style.normalText);
}
myTextView.setBackgroundResource(R.color.normalTextViewColor);