Android Custom PopupWindow/Dialog

Solution 1:

Steps I took:

1. Create a class extending Dialog.
2. In the onCreate, call setContentView(x, y) with x being your R.layout and y being R.style.popupStyle (see below).
3. In your res/values/style.xml, you need to override the default DialogWindow style. I tried just making a style that has this one as its parent, but that still didn't clear all defaults. So I checked the Android git tree and got the default style, and just copy-pasted it. This is the one:

<style name="Theme.Dialog">
    <item name="android:windowFrame">@null</item>
    <item name="android:windowTitleStyle">@android:style/DialogWindowTitle</item>
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@android:drawable/panel_background</item>
    <item name="android:windowIsFloating">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowContentOverlay">@null</item>
    <item name="android:windowAnimationStyle">@android:style/Animation.Dialog</item>
    <item name="android:windowSoftInputMode">stateUnspecified|adjustPan</item>
</style>

You'll get a few errors, just solve them by copying more stuff from the official Android styles.xml and themes.xml files. Here's the contents of my styles.xml file: http://pastebin.com/RRR15YYS

That just gives you a white popup, no borders, nothing. Start customizing. :)

Thanks to mbaird for putting me on the right track.

[edit] I needed to look up my own answer again, and I spent at least ten minutes searching the official android styles/themes files, so here they are, for future reference: styles.xml and themes.xml.

Solution 2:

It sounds like you are trying to really customize an AlertDialog. For what you are wanting to do you may be better off just creating your own class that extends Dialog, similar to how you create activities by writing a class that extends Activity.

You can set the layout XML by calling setContentView() inside the onCreate() method of your custom Dialog class, just like you would in an Activity.

I've run into limitations on how much you can customize AlertDialogs in the past, and I've just implemented my own Dialog classes to get the level of customization that I needed.