Honeycomb – customize SearchView inside the action bar-Collection of common programming errors

In case anyone wants to modify the views directly, here is how you can change the colors/fonts/images and customize the search box to your pleasure. It is wrapped in a try/catch in case there are differences between versions or distributions, so it won’t crash the app if this fails.

        // SearchView structure as we currently understand it:
        // 0 => linearlayout
        //      0 => textview (not sure what this does)
        //      1 => image view (the search icon before it's pressed)
        //      2 => linearlayout
        //           0 => linearlayout
        //               0 => ImageView (Search icon on the left of the search box)
        //               1 => SearchView$SearchAutoComplete (Object that controls the text, subclass of TextView)
        //               2 => ImageView (Cancel icon to the right of the text entry)
        //           1 => linearlayout
        //               0 => ImageView ('Go' icon to the right of cancel)
        //               1 => ImageView (not sure what this does)
        try {
            LinearLayout ll = (LinearLayout) searchView.getChildAt(0);
            LinearLayout ll2 = (LinearLayout) ll.getChildAt(2);
            LinearLayout ll3 = (LinearLayout) ll2.getChildAt(0);
            LinearLayout ll4 = (LinearLayout) ll2.getChildAt(1);
            TextView search_text = (TextView) ll3.getChildAt(1);
            search_text.setTextColor(R.color.search_text);
            ImageView cancel_icon = (ImageView)ll3.getChildAt(2);
            ImageView accept_icon = (ImageView)ll4.getChildAt(0);
            cancel_icon.setBackgroundDrawable(d);
            accept_icon.setBackgroundDrawable(d);
        } catch (Throwable e) {
            Log.e("SearchBoxConstructor", "Unable to set the custom look of the search box");
        }

This example shows changing the text color and the background colors of the cancel/accept images. searchView is a SearchView object already instantiated with it’s background color:

Drawable d = getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.search_widget_background);
searchView.setBackgroundDrawable(d);

Here is the drawable code:

Obviously, this is hacky, but it will work for now.