Question

I need help with NinePatchDrawable:

My app can download themes from the network.
Almost all things work fine, except 9-Patch PNGs.

final Bitmap bubble = getFromTheme("bubble");
if (bubble == null) return null;

final byte[] chunk = bubble.getNinePatchChunk();
if (!NinePatch.isNinePatchChunk(chunk)) return null;

NinePatchDrawable d = new NinePatchDrawable(getResources(), bubble, chunk, new Rect(), null);
v.setBackgroundDrawable(d);

d = null;
System.gc();

getFromTheme() loads the Bitmap from the SD card. The 9-Patch PNGs are already compiled, that means they include the required chunk.

The way how I convert the Bitmap to a NinePatchDrawable object seems to be working, because the image is stretchable as well as I drew it.

The only thing that doesn’t work is the padding. I already tried to set the padding to the view like this:

final Rect rect = new Rect();   // or just use the new Rect() set
d.getPadding(rect);             // in the constructor
v.setPadding(rect.left, rect.top, rect.right, rect.bottom);

d.getPadding(rect) should fill the variable rect with the padding got from the chunk, shouldn’t it? But it doesn’t.

Result: The TextView (v) does not show the text in the content area of the 9-Patch image. The paddings are set to 0 in each coordinate.

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

Finally, I did it. Android wasn’t interpreting the chunk data correctly. There might be bug. So you have to deserialize the chunk yourself to get the padding data.

Here we go:

package com.dragonwork.example;

import android.graphics.Rect;

import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.nio.ByteOrder;

class NinePatchChunk {

    public static final int NO_COLOR = 0x00000001;
    public static final int TRANSPARENT_COLOR = 0x00000000;

    public final Rect mPaddings = new Rect();

    public int mDivX[];
    public int mDivY[];
    public int mColor[];

    private static void readIntArray(final int[] data, final ByteBuffer buffer) {
        for (int i = 0, n = data.length; i < n; ++i)
            data[i] = buffer.getInt();
    }

    private static void checkDivCount(final int length) {
        if (length == 0 || (length & 0x01) != 0)
            throw new RuntimeException("invalid nine-patch: " + length);
    }

    public static NinePatchChunk deserialize(final byte[] data) {
        final ByteBuffer byteBuffer =
            ByteBuffer.wrap(data).order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder());

        if (byteBuffer.get() == 0) return null; // is not serialized

        final NinePatchChunk chunk = new NinePatchChunk();
        chunk.mDivX = new int[byteBuffer.get()];
        chunk.mDivY = new int[byteBuffer.get()];
        chunk.mColor = new int[byteBuffer.get()];

        checkDivCount(chunk.mDivX.length);
        checkDivCount(chunk.mDivY.length);

        // skip 8 bytes
        byteBuffer.getInt();
        byteBuffer.getInt();

        chunk.mPaddings.left = byteBuffer.getInt();
        chunk.mPaddings.right = byteBuffer.getInt();
        chunk.mPaddings.top = byteBuffer.getInt();
        chunk.mPaddings.bottom = byteBuffer.getInt();

        // skip 4 bytes
        byteBuffer.getInt();

        readIntArray(chunk.mDivX, byteBuffer);
        readIntArray(chunk.mDivY, byteBuffer);
        readIntArray(chunk.mColor, byteBuffer);

        return chunk;
    }
}

Use the class above as following:

final byte[] chunk = bitmap.getNinePatchChunk();
if (NinePatch.isNinePatchChunk(chunk)) {
    textView.setBackgroundDrawable(new NinePatchDrawable(getResources(),
          bitmap, chunk, NinePatchChunk.deserialize(chunk).mPaddings, null));
}

And it will work perfectly!