How to force a view to redraw immediately before the next line of code is executed

Question

I have a LinearLayout that I would like to change the background color of when one of its child views (an ImageButton) is clicked. I am able to do this, but not immediately

Answer 1

Okay, I finally found a solution to this issue, and it's simple. It seems that the problem was just that I was executing the drawable changes in an OnClickLIstener, when I should have been doing it in an OnTouchListener. If I set an OnTouchListener for my button that looks for ACTION_DOWN and then runs setBackgroundColor on its parent layout, the change occurs immediately.

An alternative, less robust solution comes from this post. You can assign a selector for the parent layout background in xml, then in the OnTouchListener mentioned above, run setPressed(true) on that layout. It's not a great solution because the selector gives you a lot less freedom than directly changing the view's properties in code. You couldn't set the layout background to a different color by pressing a different button, for example.

Thanks to those who helped out with suggestions on this!