Is there an easy way to add a border to the top and bottom of an Android View?

Question

I have a TextView and I\'d like to add a black border along its top and bottom borders. I tried adding android:drawableTop and android:drawableBottom

Answer 1

In android 2.2 you could do the following.

Create an xml drawable such as /res/drawable/textlines.xml and assign this as a TextView's background property.

/res/drawable/textlines.xml

The down side to this is that you have to specify an opaque background colour, as transparencies won't work. (At least i thought they did but i was mistaken). In the above example you can see that the solid colour of the first shape #FFffffdffffd is copied in the 2nd shapes stroke colour.