Defined color under res not usable in code.

Question

I defined a white color in mycolors.xml under res/values as below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources> 
<color name="my_white">#ffffffff</color>
</resources>

In my code, I set the text color of a TextView as the white color I defined:

TextView myText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.my_text);
myText.setTextColor(R.color.my_white);

But the text in the TextView turned out to be a black color.

When I use @color/my_white in layout xml files, it works fine.

I check the generate R.java, and see:

public static final int my_white=0x7f070025;

Did I miss something?

Thanks.

Answer 1

What you are providing setTextColor currently is the id of the my_white object, not the color my_white. I think what you want is R.color.my_white.

Answer 2

Based on the Android developer docs, it looks like your reference should be:

myText.setTextColor(R.color.my_white);

ETA: As noted in Mayra's answer, R.id.my_white is probably returning a reference to the object that represents your colour rather than the ARGB value of the colour.

Answer 3

R.color.my_white is an ID that contains a reference to your resource. setTextColor expects you pass a color, not a reference. The code compiles and gives no errors because setTextColor expect an int; but, of course, you are giving the wrong int. In this case, you will have to convert the reference to a integer that represents that color:

Resources res = getResources();
int color = res.getColor(R.color.my_white);
myText.setTextColor(color);