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

Question

Details:

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

Answer 1

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

and set the color of actionbar you want

res/values/colors.xml

    #fff //write the color you want here

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