
Here's how you would reference the custom style from an XML layout, in this case, for an EditText element:

This way, you only have to define the values that you want to change. In general, your styles should always inherit (directly or indirectly) from a standard Android style resource. The style can inherit from any type of resource that contains the style(s) you want. This attribute lets you specify a resource from which the current style will inherit values.

Notice the parent attribute in the element. Or a reference to any other resource type. The name attribute in the item can refer to a standard string, a hex color value, Here's an example declaration of a style: Īs shown, you can use elements to set specific formatting values for the style. You can then reference the custom resources from other XML resources, your manifest or application code.Inside the element, declare format values in one or more element(s).Įach identifies its style property with a name attribute and defines its style value inside the element.The name is used for referencing these styles later, and the parent indicates what style resource to inherit from. For each style or theme, add a element with a unique name and, optionally, a parent attribute.Create a file named styles.xml in the your application's res/values directory.Android provides some default style and theme resources that you can use, or you can declare your own custom style and theme resources. For example, you could define a theme that sets specific colors for the window frame and the panel foreground and background, and sets text sizes and colors for menus, then apply it to the activities of your application.

A theme is a set of one or more formatting attributes that you can apply as a unit to all activities in an application or just a single activity.For example, you could define a style that specifies a certain text size and color, then apply it to instances of a certain type of View element. A style is a set of one or more formatting attributes that you can apply as a unit to single elements in your layout XML file(s).When designing your application, you can use styles and themes to apply uniform formatting to its various screens and UI elements.
