title: Change Background color of the action bar using AppCompat
body: <p>I found some questions about this problem around the web. Unfortunately, everything i try so far, has been unsuccessful.</p>
  
  <p>Has the title say, i need to change the background color of my action bar.</p>
  
  <p>The project have a min sdk of 9, and max sdk of 19.</p>
  
  <p>I have create in my res/values folder, an xml file:</p>
  
  <p>red_actionbar.xml</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt;
  &lt;resources&gt;
      &lt;style name="CustomActionBarTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Light"&gt;
          &lt;item name="actionBarStyle"&gt;@style/MyActionBar&lt;/item&gt;
      &lt;/style&gt;
      &lt;style name="MyActionBar"
             parent="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionBar.Solid.Inverse"&gt;
          &lt;item name="background"&gt;@color/red&lt;/item&gt;
      &lt;/style&gt;
  &lt;/resources&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the colors.xml stored in res/values</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;resources&gt;
      &lt;color name="red"&gt;#FF0000&lt;/color&gt;
  &lt;/resources&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and the part of the manifest where i change the theme</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;application
      android:allowBackup="true"
      android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher"
      android:label="@string/app_name"
      android:theme="@style/CustomActionBarTheme" &gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But nothing changes.  Where is the problem?  The application accepts the code because if i change ths:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;style name="CustomActionBarTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Light"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>to</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;style name="CustomActionBarTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar "&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>it does change the theme of my app, so the problem is in the style but I don't know how to solve it.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt;
  &lt;resources&gt;
      &lt;style name="CustomActionBarTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Light"&gt;
          &lt;item name="android:actionBarStyle" tools:ignore="NewApi"&gt;@style/MyActionBar&lt;/item&gt;
          &lt;item name="actionBarStyle"&gt;@style/MyActionBar&lt;/item&gt;
      &lt;/style&gt;
      &lt;style name="MyActionBar"
             parent="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionBar.Solid.Inverse"&gt;
          &lt;item name="android:background"  tools:ignore="NewApi"&gt;@color/red&lt;/item&gt;
          &lt;item name="background"&gt;@color/red&lt;/item&gt;
      &lt;/style&gt;
  &lt;/resources&gt;
  </code></pre>