How do I change the background color of the Action

Question

Details:

I'm extending ActionBarActivity.
Eclipse and SDK fully patched as of 2011-11-06.

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="4" android:targetSdkVersion="14" />  

Deployed to Samsung device with Android 2.3.3
Application has android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Light"

Issue: application is light, but ActionBar is blue with grey icons, hardly visible against the blue background color. I also want the ActionBar to be light, so they grey icons are more visible.

I've tried modifying the styles but to no avail.
I'm probably missing something trivial.

How do I change the background color of the ActionBar of an ActionBarActivity using XML ?

Answer 1

getActionBar().setBackgroundDrawable(new ColorDrawable(getResources().getColor(R.color.TabColor)));

color.xml file:

<resources> <color name="TabColor">#11FF00</color> </resources>`

Answer 2

Behavior of Actionbar can also be changed in APIs < 11

See the Android Official Documentation for reference

I am building an app with minSdkVersion = "9" and targetSdkVersion = "21" I changed the color of action bar and it works fine with API level 9

Here is an xml

res/values/themes.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <!-- the theme applied to the application or activity -->
    <style name="CustomActionBarTheme"
           parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
        <item name="android:actionBarStyle">@style/MyActionBar</item>

        <!-- Support library compatibility -->
        <item name="actionBarStyle">@style/MyActionBar</item>
    </style>

    <!-- ActionBar styles -->
    <style name="MyActionBar"
           parent="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionBar.Solid.Inverse">
        <item name="android:background">@color/actionbar_background</item>

        <!-- Support library compatibility -->
        <item name="background">@color/actionbar_background</item>
    </style>
</resources>

and set the color of actionbar you want

res/values/colors.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <color name="actionbar_background">#fff</color> //write the color you want here
</resources>

Actionbar color can also be defined in .class file, the snippet is

ActionBar bar = getActionBar();
bar.setBackgroundDrawable(new ColorDrawable(Color.parseColor("#0000ff")));

but this will not work with the API < 11, so styling the actionbar in xml is only way for API < 11

Answer 3

On the Nexus 4 people this seems to make the color go grey.

ActionBar bar = getActionBar(); // or MainActivity.getInstance().getActionBar()
bar.setBackgroundDrawable(new ColorDrawable(0xff00DDED));
bar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false);  // required to force redraw, without, gray color
bar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(true);

(all credit to this post, but it is buried in the comments, so I wanted to surface it here) https://stackoverflow.com/a/17198657/1022454

Answer 4

try this:

ActionBar bar = getActionBar();
bar.setBackgroundDrawable(new ColorDrawable(Color.parseColor("#0000ff")));