Change AppCompat SearchView suggestion background

Question

I want to set the background of the dropdown suggestions of the SearchView in my Theme style. I don't want to do this via layout files, because I want the OS to handle the selection backgrounds themselves. Setting the background programmatically removed list selectors, and I want to avoid that.

This is what I have right now. I want the background of the rows to be white. What do I have to change in my styles.xml to achieve that?

PS: i removed the text on the suggestions myself, so it looks like a big dark block.

Answer 1

The SearchView has its popup based on a standard styled AutoCompleteTextView so you could change the standard style for this widget in your custom theme to obtain the background change. So in the custom theme override the autoCompleteTextViewStyle attribute to point to a new style in which you have to override the popupBackground with the desired background.