Change actionbar button background color when pressed

Question

If I press a button in the action bar, then its background color is not what I want. The background color of my item doesn't respond to my click event. How can I change this and change the background color when it's pressed?

Answer 1

You need to declare android:actionBarItemBackground attribute which is a:

Custom item state list drawable background for action bar items.

Then, in your styles do as follows:

<style name="CustomStyle" parent="@style/Theme.Holo.Light" >
    <item name="android:actionBarItemBackground">@drawable/ab_item_background</item>
    <item name="actionBarItemBackground">@drawable/ab_item_background</item>
</style>  

So, put your own drawable with a selector and every state (pressed, focused, disabled, etc) to have the expected background. For example, the drawable ab_item_background.xml declared above might be like this:

<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" 
    android:exitFadeDuration="@android:integer/config_mediumAnimTime">
    <!-- focused/pressed: color=red -->
    <item 
        android:state_focused="true"
        android:state_pressed="true"
        android:drawable="@color/red" />
    <!-- pressed: color=red -->
    <item 
        android:state_pressed="true"
        android:drawable="@color/red" />
    <!-- normal: color=transparent -->
    <item 
        android:drawable="@android:color/transparent" />
</selector>

In Styling the Action Bar, you can find all the customization possibles and all the attributes to do so.