Android ListView background colors always showing grey

Question

I have a ListView that I'm populating from a custom ListAdapter. Inside the Adapter (in the getView(int, View, ViewGroup) method) I'm setting the background color of the View using setBackgroundColor(int). The problem is that no matter what color I set the background to it always comes out a dark grey. It might also be worth noting that I'm using the Light theme.

Relevant (simplified) bits of code:

AndroidManifest.xml:

<activity 
    android:name=".MyActivity"
    android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Light" />

MyAdapter.java:

@Override
public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
    LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(mContext);
    View av = inflater.inflate(R.layout.my_row, parent, false);
    av.setBackgroundColor(R.color.myRow_red);
    mName = (TextView) av.findViewById(R.id.myRow_name);
    mName.setText("This is a name");
    return av;
}

Any ideas/suggestions?

Answer 1

You should use: setBackgroundResource(R.color.myRow_red) instead of setBackgroundColor(). In your example background color is assigned with the ID instead of the actual color described in the resources.

Answer 2

You must set the cacheColorHint attribute to the desired background color for your list. This is a required workaround to account for a drawing optimization Android performs on lists.

See here: link text

Answer 3

I ran into a similar problem where the divider was coming up grey. I found that the other solutions had no effect, but android:divider="<drawable,color, or whatever>" on my ListView worked.