How to tile a background image in Android

How to tile a background image in Android

For one of the apps I'm working on I wanted to have a nice pixel pattern tiled behind my widgets.After a little bit of hunting around I found this tutorial, and I thought I'd clean up the lessons within and show you how.Here's the contents of my main.xml layout file,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:background="@drawable/backrepeat"
android:gravity="center_horizontal"
>
<TextView
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="@string/hello"
/>  

</LinearLayout>

which is referenced in code in the standard way like this:

main);

...// (rest of onCreate method continues here..)

Now note this line:

android:background="@drawable/backrepeat"

What's going on there?.. Glad you asked!Here's a quick screenshot of the contents of one of my drawable folders in my project:What is this

backrepeat.xml

?Well, here's the contents of that file here:

<bitmapxmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"android:src="@drawable/scale1"android:tileMode="repeat"android:dither="true" />

Can you see what's going on?Backrepeat.xml defines an instance of the BitmapDrawable class, and that class references our simple scale1.jpg, located in the drawable-hdpifolder.Simply by adding the:

<bitmapxmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"android:src="@drawable/scale1"android:tileMode="repeat"android:dither="true" />

line in bold, we are able to achieve results such as this:Easy isn't it?One thing to keep in mind is that you should have folders drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi & drawable-ldpi, you'll need to add this backrepeat.xml file and the relevant images to each of these to allow this functionality in high, medium and low dpi (dots per inch)screen sizes.Enjoy.