You can use Theme.applyStyle to modify your theme at runtime by applying another style to it.
Let's say you have these style definitions:
<style name="DefaultTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light">
<item name="colorPrimary">@color/md_lime_500</item>
<item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/md_lime_700</item>
<item name="colorAccent">@color/md_amber_A400</item>
</style>
<style name="OverlayPrimaryColorRed">
<item name="colorPrimary">@color/md_red_500</item>
<item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/md_red_700</item>
</style>
<style name="OverlayPrimaryColorGreen">
<item name="colorPrimary">@color/md_green_500</item>
<item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/md_green_700</item>
</style>
<style name="OverlayPrimaryColorBlue">
<item name="colorPrimary">@color/md_blue_500</item>
<item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/md_blue_700</item>
</style>
Now you can patch your theme at runtime like so:
getTheme().applyStyle(R.style.OverlayPrimaryColorGreen, true);
The method applyStyle
has to be called before the layout gets inflated! So unless you load the view manually you should apply styles to the theme before calling setContentView
in your activity.
Of course this cannot be used to specify an arbitrary color, i.e. one out of 16 million (2563) colors. But if you write a small program that generates the style definitions and the Java code for you then something like one out of 512 (83) should be possible.
What makes this interesting is that you can use different style overlays for different aspects of your theme. Just add a few overlay definitions for colorAccent
for example. Now you can combine different values for primary color and accent color almost arbitrarily.
You should make sure that your overlay theme definitions don't accidentally inherit a bunch of style definitions from a parent style definition. For example a style called AppTheme.OverlayRed
implicitly inherits all styles defined in AppTheme
and all these definitions will also be applied when you patch the master theme. So either avoid dots in the overlay theme names or use something like Overlay.Red
and define Overlay
as an empty style.