CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-appcompat
Bojan Kseneman
Bojan Kseneman

Reputation: 15668

Difference between DrawableCompat and Drawable

A couple of days ago the support library version v22.1.0 was released and among the new things I have seen DrawableCompat.

Now my question is what is the difference between DrawableCompat and a normal Drawable, what benefits does it bring and when and how to use it.

I have read Chris Banes' blog, but it is lacking to properly explain what this is and how it could be useful for developers.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 579

Answers (1)

CommonsWare
CommonsWare

Reputation: 1007399

Quoting the blog post in question:

The Drawable tinting methods added in Lollipop are super useful for letting you dynamically tint assets.

Here, tinting refers to the Theme.Material/Theme.AppCompat approach of using grayscale drawables and applying tints, like colorPrimary or colorAccent, to tie them into a custom theme for an app. This is used in lots of places, in particular many places where the accent color is seen.

Continuing with the blog post:

AppCompat had its own baked in implementation in the v21 support library and we’ve now extracted that into DrawableCompat in support-v4 for everyone to use.

Hence, DrawableCompat allows you to use the tint-the-grayscale image as appcompat-v7 does, for tinting drawables, going back to API Level 4. This is in contrast to the similar tinting methods available on Drawable starting with API Level 21. In particular, if you are creating custom widgets and using appcompat-v7, you might use DrawableCompat to allow your widgets to adopt the app's color scheme.

what is the difference between DrawableCompat and a normal Drawable

DrawableCompat departs from the typical ...Compat approach. Classes like NotificationCompat.Builder are replacements for their progenitors (e.g., Notification.Builder). In this case, DrawableCompat applies certain changes, like the tint, to another Drawable, where that other drawable is "wrapped" by DrawableCompat. DrawableCompat simply provides the API and the wrap/unwrap capabilities; it is the Drawable that you get from wrap() that you would use in your app, in lieu of using the original grayscale Drawable that you started with.

Upvotes: 4

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