Question

I’m having difficulty getting Android Styles to work.
As a test, I created an EditText control and associated it with a Style called “CodeFont” like such:

 EditText et = new EditText(this, null, Resource.Style.CodeFont);

Next, I defined a style which inherits from a standard style and changes the text color to red like such:

  <resources>
      <style name="CodeFont" parent="@android:style/TextAppearance.Medium">
        <item name="android:layout_width">fill_parent</item>
        <item name="android:layout_height">wrap_content</item>
        <item name="android:textColor">#FF0000</item>
        <item name="android:typeface">monospace</item>
      </style>
    </resources>

What am I doing wrong? When the EditText appears, it no longer features the orange border on focus. This makes me think that the styling is working. However, the text color remains black.

Answer 1

Ok. I finally found the solution. I had to piece it together from a few resources.

1. In Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), there is a known problem with specifying the theme name in the attribute section of the activity: Cannot Resolve @style/Theme.Sherlock. If you use the attribute to set the theme then the compiler will return “No resource found that matches the given name (at ‘theme’ with value ‘@style/blah-blah'”. So you want to set theme using the SetTheme( ) API within the Activity’s OnCreate( ).
2. When you create your style, the style needs to be part of a theme which you referenced in Step 1. Make sure you group your styles within your theme (you can inherit from the standard Android themes if you like). For each of your style names, you will need to create an attribute reference as described in the link in Step 1. The following link is the “correct” way to define a style name resource attribute: How do I create my own resource names?
3. You need to reference your style from your theme via the attribute you defined in Step 2. For example:
   EditText et1 = new EditText(this, null, Resource.Attribute.CodeFontRef);