Spinner and its settings

Spinner is quite a handy widget when you have a set of options to select from.

In the layout file, add the spinner widget with its width and height. Dropdown items of spinner can be taken from an array.


Use an array adapter to attach these values to the spinner.


ArrayAdapter<CharSequence> adapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(
              this, R.array.lorem, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item);
myspinner.setAdapter(adapter);
adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);


But I faced a  problem that text color and gravity for spinner. Text color was  black and gravity was left even after setting proper values in xml file.

Now I created a theme in /res/values/styles.xml file as follows

<style parent="@android:style/Theme" name="my_theme">
 <item name="android:textColor">@android:color/white</item> 
<item name="android:gravity">center_horizontal</item> 
</style>

And then applied this theme to the activity in AndroidManifest,xml file of the application as

<activity android:name=".myactivity"   android:theme="@style/my_theme" />

Good. Now my spinner was looking nice with a background, an arrow, white text which is centered.

But the theme made the background and text both white, for dropdown items of the spinner



I created an xml file, language_options.xml  for the textview as follows

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<TextView 
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:padding="20dp" 
android:gravity="left" 
android:textColor="@android:color/black" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
android:id="@+id/tv" > </TextView>



Then changed this for dropdownviewresource.

adapter.setDropDownViewResource(R.layout.language_options);

This textview is used for each of dropdown items in the pop up screen for spinner.

Next to add a title to the pop up screen I added this line


spInputLanguage.setPrompt("Select One");

Now this is how spinner items look like