Develop Reference

Styling the popup menu in Android 5.0

I'm making my app ready for Android 5.0, I'm using the latest compatibility library, here is what my style looks like.
<resources>
<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
<item name="colorPrimary">#color/theme_accent</item>
<item name="colorAccent">#color/theme_accent_secondary</item>
</style>
<style name="AppThemeDark" parent="Theme.AppCompat">
<item name="colorPrimary">#color/theme_accent</item>
<item name="colorAccent">#color/theme_accent_secondary</item>
</style>
</resources>
(The ActionBar color is being set programmatically.)
Now, I want the overflow/popup menu to have the dark background like it had in the holo implementation, but I can't get it to work, here is what it looks like:
I have tried setting the popupMenuStyle but it didn't work.
How can I make the popup menu darker?

Stop using the ActionBar. If you want a ToolBar to be set up like an ActionBar, follow this guide on the android-developers blog.
It actually mentions your use case at Dark Action Bar and provides this code:
<android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:minHeight=”#dimen/triple_height_toolbar”
app:theme="#style/ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Dark.ActionBar"
app:popupTheme="#style/ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Light" />

Not a full answer but what I found so far:
In past versions you needed to specify a drawable (Check https://github.com/StylingAndroid/StylingActionBar code and tutorials)
Apparently, now that is a color. To modify it you need to do specify the following theme:
<resources xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Material.Light.DarkActionBar">
<item name="android:actionBarPopupTheme">#style/popupNew</item>
</style>
<style name="popupNew" parent="android:ThemeOverlay.Material.Light">
<item name="android:colorBackground">#color/red</item>
</style>
</resources>
This works correctly if the theme applied to the app is just this.
If I add android:actionBarPopupTheme to my existing theme, it doesn't work. I am trying to figure out why.

Solved my problem by using this style:
<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
<item name="colorPrimary">#color/theme_accent</item>
<item name="colorAccent">#color/theme_accent_secondary</item>
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/AbStyle</item>
<item name="actionModeBackground">#color/actionmode_bg</item>
</style>
<style name="AbStyle" parent="Widget.AppCompat.Toolbar">
<item name="elevation">2dp</item>
<item name="displayOptions">homeAsUp|showTitle</item>
<!--showHome-->
</style>
<style name="AppThemeDark" parent="Theme.AppCompat">
<item name="colorAccent">#color/theme_accent_secondary</item>
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/AbStyle</item>
</style>
I had to use Widget.AppCompat.Toolbar as the parent actionBarStyle

Add the property popupTheme to your toolbar:
<android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
android:id="#+id/toolbar"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:background="#color/color_primary"
app:theme="#style/Theme.AppCompat.Light"
app:popupTheme="#style/Theme.AppCompat" />
Or define a new style for your toolbar:
<style name="MyToolBarStyle" parent="Widget.AppCompat.Toolbar">
<item name="android:background">#color/green</item>
<item name="popupTheme">#style/Theme.AppCompat.Light</item>
<item name="theme">#style/Theme.AppCompat</item>
</style>

This question has already been answered for styling via XML, but I'm adding an explanation here of how to work out the solution to this and similar styling questions yourself.
First, this is the solution when using AppCompat. To your App's style.xml add actionBarPopupTheme to your theme:
<style name="Theme.MyTheme" parent="#style/Base.Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
...other stuff here
<item name="actionBarPopupTheme">#style/Theme.MyTheme.ActionBarPopupTheme</item>
</style>
<style name="Theme.MyTheme.ActionBarPopupTheme" parent="#style/ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Light">
<item name="android:textColor">#android:color/white</item>
<item name="android:background">#android:color/black</item>
</style>
Here's the steps I took to arrive at this solution (it takes a bit of detective work as the Android documentation is poor):
Open your App's style.xml in Android Studio
On the line where you App's theme is defined, put your screen cursor in the parent theme (e.g. click in #style/Base.Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar) then press F4. This should take you to the source code for the style in the appcompat library.
Within this style I saw this line:
< item name="actionBarPopupTheme">#style/ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Light< /item>
This looked like a possible place to change the theme of the popup. I searched for "actionBarPopupTheme" in the poor
Android developers documentation and found "Reference to a theme that should be used to
inflate popups shown by widgets in the action bar". So this was worth playing with.
I copied the appcompat line containing "actionBarPopupTheme" to my style.xml then in this line replaced the item's theme reference (the bit in bold above) with Theme.MyTheme.ActionBarPopupTheme.
In my style.xml I created my new style named Theme.MyTheme.ActionBarPopupTheme. I used the same parent that was used in the style I copied from the appcompat source (the bit in bold above).
To ensure my new popup style was working, I changed the parent style to ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Dark then ran and tested the code on a device. The popup style changed, so now I knew my overriding of actionBarPopupTheme was the correct thing to do. Then I changed back to ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Light.
The next challenge is to work out what item names to override in Theme.MyTheme.ActionBarPopupTheme. I changed the text and background colours. To find the correct item names that change the style of something can be tricky in some cases. One way to find less obvious style item names is to look through the style definitions in the appcompat xml file (the one you opened when pressing F4 in the 2nd step above), continually descending into parent styles (F4 again!) until you find something that may do what you want. Google searches will help here too.

Missing TextAppearances.Micro style

According to Android Developer Design Style for Typography, there are 4 TextAppearances (Micro, Small, Medium, Large).
But there is no predefined style for Micro:
?android:attr/textAppearanceMicro
android:style/TextAppearance.Micro
None of them can be found in sources of Android. What am I missing?

Good question! After researching a little bit, I didn't find any results for "TextAppearance.Micro".
On the other hand, I found the official Android source for style resource related to TextAppearances.
<style name="TextAppearance.Small">
<item name="android:textSize">14sp</item>
<item name="android:textColor">?textColorSecondary</item>
</style>
<style name="TextAppearance.Medium">
<item name="android:textSize">18sp</item>
</style>
<style name="TextAppearance.Large">
<item name="android:textSize">22sp</item>
</style>
As you can see, all of them only affect the text size (except TextAppearance.Small, which also affect the text color). So, I can safely say that the site displays the text sizes as a guideline only. On the other hand, you can always add a custom style to support TextAppearance.Micro! Just insert this inside styles.xml.
<style name="TextAppearance.Micro" parent="#android:style/TextAppearance.Small">
<item name="android:textSize">12sp</item>
</style>
and use it like:
<TextView
...
android:textAppearance="#style/TextAppearance.Micro" />
On a bit related note, when I searched "textAppearanceMicro", I found 3 projects on GitHub. All of them adding some custom attributes, which one of them is textAppearanceMicro. Also, all of them are using ActionBarSherlock. I don't know whether there is a connection between textAppearanceMicro and ActionBarSherlock, but I didn't find that attribute was used anywhere in the code.

If you happen to use the Google AppCompat Library, you can use the following:
<TextView
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:textAppearance="#style/TextAppearance.AppCompat.Caption" />

Change holo spinner text colour

I have a spinner in a Holo theme dialog and am trying to change the text colour because it is very hard to read:
I have looked at android styles.xml, as well as many other answers, and believe that I am setting the custom style correctly; but it's just not getting picked up.
This is an extract from the dialog layout file where the spinner lives:
<Spinner
android:id="#+id/spn_Type"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_weight="1"
android:entries="#array/dose_type_options"
style="#style/DialogSpinner" />
And these are the relevant entries in styles.xml in the values-v14 folder:
<style name="DialogSpinner" parent="#android:style/Widget.Holo.Spinner">
<item name="android:spinnerItemStyle">#style/MySpinnerItem</item>
</style>
<style name="MySpinnerItem" parent="android:Widget.Holo.TextView.SpinnerItem">
<item name="android:textAppearance">#style/MyTextAppearanceSpinnerItem</item>
</style>
<style name="MyTextAppearanceSpinnerItem" parent="android:TextAppearance.Holo.Widget.TextView.SpinnerItem">
<item name="android:textColor">#FFF</item>
</style>
The dialog itself is forced to the Holo dark theme by using:
<style name="FibroDialog" parent="#android:style/Theme.Holo.Dialog">
</style>
Can anyone identify why the spinner text isn't white?
I have looked at other solutions, which suggest changing the colour in code, but this app supports 2.3.* upwards, so for those non-holo versions black text is fine, hence trying to do it by styles.
Thanks
Updated using answer from Woda below
The text colour of the initial value of the spinner is now white, which goes a long way to highlighting that there is a spinner there for the user:
But the text colour of the selectable items is still black. I guess it's not a massive deal, at least the existence of the spinner has been affirmed by getting the initial text changed to white. But I would be interested to know why the items are still black, and how to change them to white.

Have you tried to accept the SpinnerItemStyle to your Theme? So all Spinners in your App would've the same style. I'm using it like this and it works:
theme.xml:
<style name="exampleTheme" parent="android:Theme.Holo.Light">
<item name="android:spinnerItemStyle">#style/SpinnerItem_example</item>
...
</style>
style.xml:
<style name="SpinnerItem_example" parent="android:TextAppearance.Widget.TextView.SpinnerItem">
<item name="android:textColor">#000000</item>
</style>
Update:
Taking a deeper look into the styles.xml brought me this:
<style name="Widget.DropDownItem.Spinner">
<item name="android:checkMark">?android:attr/listChoiceIndicatorSingle</item>
</style>
<style name="Widget.DropDownItem">
<item name="android:textAppearance">#style/TextAppearance.Widget.DropDownItem</item>
<item name="android:paddingStart">#dimen/dropdownitem_text_padding_left</item>
<item name="android:paddingEnd">#dimen/dropdownitem_text_padding_right</item>
<item name="android:gravity">center_vertical</item>
</style>
So you probably need to customize the Widget.DropDownItem and accept it in your theme.
...
<item name="dropDownItemStyle">#android:style/Widget.DropDownItem</item>
...
For customizing my application the following two links helped me a lot to understand the structure of the different views. These two files are part of the android source code. May be it helps you too.
themes.xml
styles.xml

I fixed it by calling
mArrayAdapter.setDropDownViewTheme(mActivity.getTheme());
Hope this helps someone ;)

You can access the internal TextView in code without changing any styles. This is how I handled enabling and disabling Spinners
The .getSelectedView() did not work for me. So I tricked the Spinner to "show" being disabled.
You will need to define your own colors for the "disabled" look.
For Example:
R.color.blue_text //means enabled
R.color.gray_text //means disabled
So to disable my spinner:
((TextView)mySpinner.getChildAt(0)).setTextColor(getResources().getColor(R.color.gray_text));
mySpinner.setEnabled(false);
mySpinner.setFocusable(false);
To enable my spinner:
((TextView)mySpinner.getChildAt(0)).setTextColor(getResources().getColor(R.color.blue_text));
mySpinner.setEnabled(true);
mySpinner.setFocusable(true);
The getChildAt(0) function allows you to access the first item in the spinner, which is what you show on the screen as a TextView.
You don't need to change styles or modify any XML. Just do this in your code, even within event methods, you should be fine.

Change the line color used in listSeparatorTextViewStyle

I have the following code
<TextView
android:text="#string/hello"
style="?android:attr/listSeparatorTextViewStyle" />
and I will get the following effect.
However, I am not happy with the color line. I would like to have something like
I would like it to have blue color line as in holo. I try the following custom style.
<style name="MyOwnListSeperatorTextViewStyle">
<item name="android:background">#android:drawable/list_section_divider_holo_light</item>
<item name="android:textAllCaps">true</item>
<!-- Copy from Widget.TextView.ListSeparator -->
<item name="android:background">#android:drawable/dark_header_dither</item>
<item name="android:layout_width">match_parent</item>
<item name="android:layout_height">wrap_content</item>
<item name="android:textStyle">bold</item>
<item name="android:textColor">?textColorSecondary</item>
<item name="android:textSize">14sp</item>
<item name="android:gravity">center_vertical</item>
<item name="android:paddingLeft">8dip</item>
</style>
But it won't work, as I get the following error.
error: Error: Resource is not public. (at 'android:background' with value '#android:drawable/dark_header_dither').
Have idea how can I change the line color used in listSeparatorTextViewStyle?

I needed to do this to override the typical Holo Spinner style (I didn't want the underlined item - i just wanted the arrow), and I think this can be overridden in precisely the same manner:
First off, you want to find the item you wish to override in the android styles source. There is an incredibly useful SO answer that contains all of the styles (and the names to override them) right here: Set Dialog theme to parent Theme in Android
I believe yours is the following line:
<item name="listSeparatorTextViewStyle">#android:style/Widget.Holo.Light.TextView.ListSeparator</item>
This takes us on a journey to find the style Widget.Holo.Light.TextView.ListSeparator which should live somewhere on your very own computer! But I'll make it easy and just c&p it:
<style name="Widget.Holo.Light.TextView.ListSeparator" parent="Widget.TextView.ListSeparator">
<item name="android:background">#android:drawable/list_section_divider_holo_light</item>
</style>
Now, you probably want to leave well enough alone, and just look at that background drawable. You will find it is a grey 9patch file that looks like the sinister grey line you seek to avoid.
We need to override this. I am sure there are a number of ways to do this, but I do so by customizing the theme of the application. Here is the themes.xml file:
<style name="AppTheme" parent="#android:style/Theme.Holo.Light.NoActionBar">
<item name="android:listSeparatorTextViewStyle">#style/MyOwnListSeperatorTextViewStyle</item>
</style>
<style name="MyOwnListSeperatorTextViewStyle" parent="Widget.TextView.ListSeparator">
<item name="android:background">#drawable/make_your_own_blue_9_patch_here</item>
</style>
Notice how we used the listSeparatorTextViewStyle from that previous SO post? And the parent of the custom style is the Widget.TextView.ListSeparator from android's style source? All very important.
Now you just need to apply this theme to your app, but I am assuming you have a theme already. If you haven't already, you will need to make your own 9patch but I would just look at the list_section_divider_holo_light.9.png file on your computer, and make the grey parts blue, and then make a copy and place it into your own drawables folder.
Hope this works and is helpful!

How to applicate android styles without change .java?

My question is simple, I want to improve an android application using styles, so without change the *.java file…what I mean is use always “android.R.layout“ in the .java, but be allowed to change the appearance of spinner (and its options), the color of a textview, the background…etc
I’ve researched that defining styles.xml like this:
<resources>
<style name="GreenHeader" >
<item name="android:textColor">#04B404</item>
<item name="android:typeface">normal</item>
<item name="android:textSize">30pt</item>
<item name="android:gravity">center</item>
<item name="android:layout_width">wrap_content</item>
<item name="android:layout_height">wrap_content</item>
</style>
<style name="RedHeader" parent="#style/GreenHeader" >
<item name="android:textColor">#FF0000</item>
</style>
</resources>
and calling
:android:theme="#style/RedHeader"
in the manifest.xml, when you use (for example) in the layout:
<Spinner
style= "#style/RedHeader"
something change…but it doesn’t works well, I don’t know what more I need, maybe some other xml file called themes…but I don’t know, I’ve found hours and hours without result
I need help to improve it, please!! Could anyone help me???

Sorry you can not change styles programatically in android, but you can change a view or widget background programatically if it is enough for you.