Question

I would like to make a TextView to be entirely underlined but I can’t use a text resource and <u> tag because it is dynamic text.

Related: Can I underline text in an android layout?

So far the only way I know to do this is at runtime. Is this really the only way? Is there a way I could do it in the XML files?

Answer 1

The easiest solution is probably to create a custom UnderLineTextView component deriving from TextView, override setText() and set the entire text as underlined, something like this (underline code from the link you referred to above):

@Override
public void setText(CharSequence text, BufferType type) {
    // code to check text for null omitted
    SpannableString content = new SpannableString(text);
    content.setSpan(new UnderlineSpan(), 0, text.length(), 0);
    super.setText(content, BufferType.SPANNABLE);

}

It’s then just a matter of using your new component in the layout and setting the text as usual. The rest is handled automatically.

More info on custom components:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/custom-components.html