Setting Foreground of AppCompatImageView programatically Android API 19

Question

I'm currently creating a menu that lets users select an AppCompatImageView in a GridLayout and will show that the view is selected by placing a checkmark icon in the foreground of the image. In api 23, I can do this by simply calling View.setForeground() but in lower api's, that method doesn't exist. Is there some sort of workaround that I could use?

I've tried using a LayerDrawable but the checkmark icon gets squished if the image I set using android:src= isn't the same height. Here's what the code for that looks like right now:

AppCompatImageView imageView = (AppCompatImageView) view;

int id = getResources().getIdentifier("drawable/" + view.getTag(), null, getPackageName());
Drawable backgroundLayer = ContextCompat.getDrawable(this, id);
Drawable foregroundLayer = ContextCompat.getDrawable(this, R.drawable.ic_selected);

Drawable[] layers = {backgroundLayer, foregroundLayer};
LayerDrawable layerDrawable = new LayerDrawable(layers);
imageView.setImageDrawable(layerDrawable);

And here's what that ends up looking like:

When I'd like the check to be a square aspect ratio. I'd like to avoid redoing the drawable background to make it a square aspect ratio because I have a large amount of other drawables that I'd have to redo as well.

Answer 1

Have you tried setting the image as the background and the checkmark as the src? Once the ImageView is set to a fixed size to match the aspect ratio of the image it should work fine.

imageView.setBackgroundResource(id)

imageView.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_selected)

Using a scaleType of CENTER if the size of the check mark is ideal or CENTER_INSIDE with padding should get you what you want.