Is there an easy way to add a border to the top and bottom of an Android View?

Question

I have a TextView and I'd like to add a black border along its top and bottom borders. I tried adding android:drawableTop and android:drawableBottom to the TextView, but that only caused the entire view to become black.

<TextView     android:background="@android:color/green"     android:layout_width="fill_parent"     android:layout_height="wrap_content"     android:drawableTop="@android:color/black"     android:drawableBottom="@android:color/black"     android:text="la la la" /> 

Is there a way to easily add a top and bottom border to a View (in particular, a TextView) in Android?

Answer 1

In android 2.2 you could do the following.

Create an xml drawable such as /res/drawable/textlines.xml and assign this as a TextView's background property.

<TextView android:text="My text with lines above and below" android:background="@drawable/textlines" /> 

/res/drawable/textlines.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >     <item>       <shape          android:shape="rectangle">             <stroke android:width="1dp" android:color="#FF000000" />             <solid android:color="#FFDDDDDD" />          </shape>    </item>     <item android:top="1dp" android:bottom="1dp">        <shape          android:shape="rectangle">             <stroke android:width="1dp" android:color="#FFDDDDDD" />             <solid android:color="#00000000" />         </shape>    </item>  </layer-list> 

The down side to this is that you have to specify an opaque background colour, as transparencies won't work. (At least i thought they did but i was mistaken). In the above example you can see that the solid colour of the first shape #FFdddddd is copied in the 2nd shapes stroke colour.