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

Here an improved version of cottonBallPaws' setBackgroundAndKeepPadding. This maintains the padding even if you call the method multiple times:

/**
 * Sets the background for a view while preserving its current padding. If the background drawable
 * has its own padding, that padding will be added to the current padding.
 */
public static void setBackgroundAndKeepPadding(View view, Drawable backgroundDrawable) {

    Rect drawablePadding = new Rect();
    backgroundDrawable.getPadding(drawablePadding);

    // Add background padding to view padding and subtract any previous background padding
    Rect prevBackgroundPadding = (Rect) view.getTag(R.id.prev_background_padding);
    int left = view.getPaddingLeft() + drawablePadding.left -
            (prevBackgroundPadding == null ? 0 : prevBackgroundPadding.left);
    int top = view.getPaddingTop() + drawablePadding.top -
            (prevBackgroundPadding == null ? 0 : prevBackgroundPadding.top);
    int right = view.getPaddingRight() + drawablePadding.right -
            (prevBackgroundPadding == null ? 0 : prevBackgroundPadding.right);
    int bottom = view.getPaddingBottom() + drawablePadding.bottom -
            (prevBackgroundPadding == null ? 0 : prevBackgroundPadding.bottom);
    view.setTag(R.id.prev_background_padding, drawablePadding);

    view.setBackgroundDrawable(backgroundDrawable);
    view.setPadding(left, top, right, bottom);
}

You need to define a resource id via values/ids.xml: