Question

I would like to be able to declare some themes to easily change the look and feel of my app. So I get that you can define a style inheriting from android:Theme and then define attributes within this.

But two questions:

1. What if I want to have, say, more than one background color for different views within the app? So that I can have, say, a background to the whole activity and a different background to the text views in the activity and another background for buttons etc. But then have these (different) colours theme dependent?
2. Is it possible to define a set of drawables which depends on the theme in use. I mean in a similar way to how you can define different drawables for different screen densities for example. Ideally I would have images with different color schemes used for the different themes. Can this behaviour be defined in android?

Thanks for your help,
James

Answer 1

You could just define different styles for the different colours or drawables required for each widget type and refer to those in your various themes. For example:

<!-- themes -->

<style name="MyTheme" parent="android:style/Theme.Light">
    <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@drawable/something</item>
    <item name="android:buttonStyle">@style/MyButton</item>
</style>

<style name="MyTheme.Red">
    <item name="android:buttonStyle">@style/MyButton.Red</item>
</style>

<style name="MyTheme.Blue">
    <item name="android:buttonStyle">@style/MyButton.Blue</item>
</style>

<!-- styles -->

<style name="MyButton" parent="android:style/Widget.Button">
    <item name="android:background">@drawable/btn_mydefault</item>
</style>

<style name="MyButton.Red">
    <item name="android:background">@drawable/btn_red</item>
</style>

<style name="MyButton.Blue">
    <item name="android:background">@drawable/btn_blue</item>
</style>