XML drawable Bitmap tileMode bug?

Question

I'm having issues where my drawable resource uses the tileMode repeat. In some cases the image is just stretched and sometimes it is properly repeated.

The following are the xml files I use to create the button states:

Image drawable used for tile repeated

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

btn_menu_item.xml

<selector 
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:constantSize="true" android:visible="true" android:variablePadding="true">
    <!-- selected -->
    <item 
        android:state_selected="true" 
        android:drawable="@drawable/menu_item_selected"/>

    <!-- focused -->
    <item 
        android:state_focused="true" 
        android:drawable="@drawable/menu_item_pressed"/>

    <!-- pressed -->
    <item 
        android:state_pressed="true" 
        android:drawable="@drawable/menu_item_pressed"/>

    <!-- normal -->
    <item 
        android:state_pressed="false" 
        android:state_focused="false" 
        android:drawable="@drawable/menu_item_normal"/>

</selector>

menu_item_normal.xml

<layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
    <item android:state_selected="true">
        <shape android:shape="rectangle">
            <gradient 
                android:startColor="#757575" 
                android:endColor="#929292" 
                android:angle="90"/>
        </shape>    
    </item>

    <item>
        <bitmap 
            android:src="@drawable/menu_lines_texture"  
            android:tileMode="repeat"
            android:dither="true"/>
    </item>
</layer-list>

menu_item_pressed.xml

<layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
    <item android:state_selected="true">
        <shape android:shape="rectangle">
            <gradient 
                android:startColor="#dd4e00" 
                android:endColor="#c64600" 
                android:angle="90"/>
        </shape>
    </item>

    <item>
        <bitmap 
            android:src="@drawable/menu_lines_texture"  
            android:tileMode="repeat"
            android:dither="true"/>
    </item>
</layer-list>

Please see the images below of what exactly I'm talking about.

Carrington

Answer 1

This is a known bug, partially fixed in Android 3.0 and completely fixed in ICS.

Execrate

Thanks for your reply on this! Is there a workaround for this? – Carrington

I am still finding this problem in 3.2 on the Xoom. Setting it in code fixes it. – Zurheide

Like I said, completely fixed in ICS :) – Execrate

Can you point what the problem was so we could think about non-code workaround? Or is this utopia? – Eyla

How can you set the tiling mode from code in case of a statelist drawable? – Vigilant

I tried to horizontally tile a 50 (wide) x 3000 (high) pixel image and Android reported it can't make a texture that big. Then I fired up photoshop, manually tiled it into a 1000x3000 image and there's no problem to show it... – Sheets

Answer 2

We were having a similar problem writing for 3.2 on Sony's Google TV device. We noticed some very similar background-striping stemming from using android:tileMode="repeat" on a bitmap as a background image.

In this case, the fix was to turn off hardware acceleration on the view that contained the bitmap like so (from a function in our Activity):

View tile_holder = this.findViewById(R.id.tile_holder);
tile_holder.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);

Tades

I can vouch for this. Problem still exists on older phones running Lollipop, setting the tile mode programmatically didn't work but this did (via the containing layout file). – Slumberous