Setting background colour of Android layout element

Question

You can use simple color resources, specified usually inside res/values/colors.xml.

<color name="red">#ffff0000</color>

and use this via android:background="@color/red". This color can be used anywhere else too, e.g. as a text color. Reference it in XML the same way, or get it in code via getResources().getColor(R.color.red).

You can also use any drawable resource as a background, use android:background="@drawable/mydrawable" for this (that means 9patch drawables, normal bitmaps, shape drawables, ..).

The above answers are nice.You can also go like this programmatically if you want

First, your layout should have an ID. Add it by writing following +id line in res/layout/*.xml

<RelativeLayout ...
...
android:id="@+id/your_layout_id"
...
</RelativeLayout>

Then, in your Java code, make following changes.

RelativeLayout rl = (RelativeLayout)findViewById(R.id.your_layout_id);
rl.setBackgroundColor(Color.RED);

apart from this, if you have the color defined in colors.xml, then also you can do programmatically :

rl.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(getContext(), R.color.red));

You can use android:background="#DC143C", or any other RGB values for your color. I have no problem using it this way, as stated here

The

res/values/colors.xml.

<color name="red">#ffff0000</color>
android:background="@color/red"

example didn't work for me, but the

android:background="#(hexidecimal here without these parenthesis)"

worked for me in the relative layout element as an attribute.

If you want to change a color quickly (and you don't have Hex numbers memorized) android has a few preset colors you can access like this:

android:background="@android:color/black"

There are 15 colors you can choose from which is nice for testing things out quickly, and you don't need to set up additional files.

Setting up a values/colors.xml file and using straight Hex like explained above will still work.

4 possible ways, use one you need.

1. Kotlin

val ll = findViewById<LinearLayout>(R.id.your_layout_id)
ll.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.white))

2. Data Binding

<LinearLayout
    android:background="@{@color/white}"

OR more useful statement-

<LinearLayout
    android:background="@{model.colorResId}"

3. XML

<LinearLayout
    android:background="#FFFFFF"

<LinearLayout
    android:background="@color/white"

4. Java

LinearLayout ll = (LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.your_layout_id);
ll.setBackgroundColor(ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.white));