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androidandroid-constraintlayout

android ConstraintLayout does not allow negative margins

I position lots of items relative to a layout guide, and would like to position a new item nearly relative to this layout guide.

I tried with a negative layout margin without success.

Solution

  • Support for setting negative margin in a ConstraintLayout has been added in ConstraintLayout 2.1.0 alpha 2 on the 17th of December 2020.

    You can update to it by setting the dependency to:

    implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.1.0-alpha2'

    The full changelog is available here: https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2020/12/constraintlayout-210-alpha-2.html which includes:

    ConstraintLayout

    • supports negative margins for constraints

    This means that now you can do things such as android:layout_marginTop="-25dp", which you couldn't do before!