Where'd padding go, when setting background Drawable?

Question

I have this issue on my EditText and Button views, where I have a nice padding for them to space away from the text, but when I change the backgrou

Answer 1

My solution was to extend the view (in my case an EditText) and override setBackgroundDrawable() and setBackgroundResource() methods:

// Stores padding to avoid padding removed on background change issue
public void storePadding(){
    mPaddingLeft = getPaddingLeft();
    mPaddingBottom = getPaddingTop();
    mPaddingRight = getPaddingRight();
    mPaddingTop = getPaddingBottom();
}

// Restores padding to avoid padding removed on background change issue
private void restorePadding() {
    this.setPadding(mPaddingLeft, mPaddingTop, mPaddingRight, mPaddingBottom);
}

@Override
public void setBackgroundResource(@DrawableRes int resId) {
    storePadding();
    super.setBackgroundResource(resId);
    restorePadding();
}

@Override
public void setBackgroundDrawable(Drawable background) {
    storePadding();
    super.setBackgroundDrawable(background);
    restorePadding();
}

Answer 2

I had this problem in a TextView, so I subclassed TextView and made an Override method of the TextView.setBackgroundResource(int resid) method. Like this:

@Override
public void setBackgroundResource(int resid) {
    int pl = getPaddingLeft();
    int pt = getPaddingTop();
    int pr = getPaddingRight();
    int pb = getPaddingBottom();

    super.setBackgroundResource(resid);

    this.setPadding(pl, pt, pr, pb);
}

This way, it gets the padding of the item before it sets the resource, but doesn't actually mess with the original functionality of the method, other than keeping the padding.

Answer 3

In my case I had a drawable and was so stupid I didn't see the paddings were all set to 0 in the xml.

Answer 4

just change lib to v7:22.1.0 in android studio like this compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:22.1.0'

Answer 5

What I found was adding a 9 patch as a background resource reset the padding - although interestingly if I added a color, or non-9 patch image, it didn't. The solution was to save the padding values before the background gets added, then set them again afterwards.

private EditText value = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.value);

int pL = value.getPaddingLeft();
int pT = value.getPaddingTop();
int pR = value.getPaddingRight();
int pB = value.getPaddingBottom();

value.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.bkg);
value.setPadding(pL, pT, pR, pB);

Answer 6

Combining the solutions of all, I wrote one in Kotlin:

fun View.setViewBackgroundWithoutResettingPadding(@DrawableRes backgroundResId: Int) {
    val paddingBottom = this.paddingBottom
    val paddingStart = ViewCompat.getPaddingStart(this)
    val paddingEnd = ViewCompat.getPaddingEnd(this)
    val paddingTop = this.paddingTop
    setBackgroundResource(backgroundResId)
    ViewCompat.setPaddingRelative(this, paddingStart, paddingTop, paddingEnd, paddingBottom)
}

fun View.setViewBackgroundWithoutResettingPadding(background: Drawable?) {
    val paddingBottom = this.paddingBottom
    val paddingStart = ViewCompat.getPaddingStart(this)
    val paddingEnd = ViewCompat.getPaddingEnd(this)
    val paddingTop = this.paddingTop
    ViewCompat.setBackground(this, background)
    ViewCompat.setPaddingRelative(this, paddingStart, paddingTop, paddingEnd, paddingBottom)
}