Question

in my current project I’m building an App with API 10 which should look like an ICS App.
Since my GUI is not very complex I can build this all manually, but I have some problems with button states.

I googled a lot and found nothing that would work for me so I would appreciate any help 😉

I designed an action bar with google ICS stock icons. When for example someone touches the search-loupe-icon, which has an 8dp padding around it, it’s background color should change to a defined highlight-color-value.

So now you would suggest probably a selector drawable. But my case is: I have an icon-drawable which has an background-color, which I want to change. I dont want to change the icon, so since I cant change the backgroundcolor from a selector-xml this doesn’t work.
(I thought I can setup multiple drawable-xml with my icon static bg colors so that I could refer with one selector to those different colored icons, but since a shape-drawable-xml cannot have a source and an bitmap-drawable-xml cannot have a background color, this is no sollution.)

If I try to change the background color in my onclick-listener (also tried onTouch) with:

ImageButton searchIcon = (ImageButton) findViewById(R.id.upper_actionbar_icon_search);
            searchIcon.setBackgroundColor(R.color.android_ics_blue_light);

The Icon gets a dark grey bg color. This is also true for any other color altough nothing lies on top of the ImageButton. I also tried an ImageView.

So could someone explain to my please how the hell I can define a highlighted bg color-image without any hacks (default-gone image that lies above the icon and is set visible onclick).
Thanks so much!!

Answer 1

Okay the solution is simple.

Write yourself a drawable selector which looks like this:

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

<item android:state_selected="true">
    <shape android:shape="rectangle">
        <solid android:color="@color/android_ics_blue_light"/>
    </shape>
</item>


<item android:state_pressed="true">
    <shape android:shape="rectangle">
        <solid android:color="@color/android_ics_blue_light"/>
    </shape>
</item>

 <item>
    <shape android:shape="rectangle">
        <solid android:color="@color/light_grey"/>
    </shape>
</item>

Within your ImageButton code define your icon as src and your new drawable as background, like this:

<ImageButton
                <!-- ... -->
                android:src="@drawable/icon_search" 
                android:background="@drawable/actionbar_ontouch"

                />

Works like a charm!