How to add a simple 8dp header/footer to Android's RecyclerView?

Question

Is there a way to add a simple header/footer to a RecyclerView?

Here you can see what I've got. The first Card touches the Toolbar

And here you can see what I would like to achieve:
8dp Padding between the bottom and the Card.

Methods I tried so far:

Use a header view in my recyclerview. But I think it is very inefficient to do this for every recyclerview.

use a 8dp top margin which results in the problem that the recyclerview has white bars on top/bottom when scrolling.

add a padding to the list item which results in different margins between the outer and inner cards.

I'm sure that there is a simple solution which I don't know so far.

Answer 1

Adding a top padding and setting clipToPadding to false will do the trick.
Something like this:

  <android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView
    android:id="@+id/recyclerview"
    android:paddingTop="8dp"
    android:clipToPadding="false"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent" />

Answer 2

If you are using a RecyclerView with a layout_weight, and paddingBottom is not working for you, making sure you set the layout_height to 0dp! Otherwise, strangely, paddingTop works but paddingBottom does not:

<android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView android:id="@+id/recycler"
    android:paddingBottom="20dp"
    android:clipToPadding="false"
    android:layout_weight="1"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="0dp" />