It’s interesting some of the little things you could take for granted and figure out while digging in the Android source code. If you’ve ever created your own custom views in Android you’ll note that sometimes you might require to make your own custom element attributes to style the appearance of your view when its defined in an XML file/element. Did you know though that instead of recreating some common attribute you could reuse the built-in defined element attributes?

Instead of:

<resources> <declare-styleable name = "MyAwesomeLabelView" > <attr name="malv_text" format="string|reference"/> <attr name="malv_icon" format="reference"/> </declare-styleable> </resources>

you could :

<resources> <declare-styleable name = " MyAwesomeLabelView " > <attr name="android:text" /> <attr name="android:icon" /> </declare-styleable> </resources>

Pretty cool huh!? Just don’t get carried away with this by “overriding” all the native attributes in your custom views styleable declaration.