android - Tiled drawable sometimes stretches

Question

I have a ListView whose items have a tiled background. To accomplish this, I use the following drawable xml:

<bitmap
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:src="@drawable/tile"
    android:tileMode="repeat" />

Usually, this works. Sometimes, however, the src drawable isn't tiled, but stretched to fill the entire list item. (I've got several different tiles like this, and I use them mixed in one ListView. If there is stretching instead of tiling, it's never been in all of them at once, for what that's worth.)

I also tried to add android:dither="true" to that xml, since I read somewhere that without it there might be bugs. That didn't change anything.

Has anyone had the same problem? How did you fix it?

Answer 1

I also got bitten by this problem. Very hard to diagnose, even harder to find similar reports and usable solutions.

"Tapas" on the freenode #android-dev irc channel came with the following utility method:

public static void fixBackgroundRepeat(View view) {
    Drawable bg = view.getBackground();
    if (bg != null) {
        if (bg instanceof BitmapDrawable) {
            BitmapDrawable bmp = (BitmapDrawable) bg;
            bmp.mutate(); // make sure that we aren't sharing state anymore
            bmp.setTileModeXY(TileMode.REPEAT, TileMode.REPEAT);
        }
    }
}

Apply it to all Views that have a tiled background set (e.g. findViewById them).

Also, I have the impression this bug started acting up after setting "anyDensity=true" in AndroidManifest.xml