Setting background colour of Android layout element

Question

I am trying to, somewhat clone the design of an activity from a set of slides on Android UI design. However I am having a problem with a very simple task.

I have cre

Answer 1

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));

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Android studio 2.1.2 (or possibly earlier) will let you pick from a color wheel:

I got this by adding the following to my layout:

android:background="#FFFFFF"

Then I clicked on the FFFFFF color and clicked on the lightbulb that appeared.