Using resources referenced in the current theme

I find myself again trying to use resources set in the current theme inside my Android application and running into difficulties.

Following the rough guidelines found here for theme attribute value reuse

I was originally trying to create a selector like so

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

    <item android:state_pressed="true" android:drawable="?android:attr/selectableItemBackground" />

    <item android:drawable="@color/transparent" />

</selector>

where the pressed state drawable is declared like so

<item name="selectableItemBackground">@android:drawable/item_background</item>

in the current ICS themes xml doc themes xml doc . This compiles fine in eclispse (whereas if i spell the attr wrong it will give an error or reffng @android:drawable/item_background directly will inform me the drawable itself is private).

When i run the app i get a

FATAL EXCEPTION: main

E / AndroidRuntime (18815): android.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #14: Error inflating class <unknown>

without any other useful information apart from the xml file that is using this selector for an ImageViews android:background attribute value. I know that there is a bug where colorStateLists cant be used as backgrounds as mentioned here and maybe this also applys to drawableState lists referencing drawables from the theme. I know however it does work as the post mentioned describes.

Am i missing something here?? I always run into something i dont understand when trying to do stuff like this so would be glad of any pointers.

Thanks for any help

EDIT

as another experiement I tried setting an alias to the referenced drawable in the theme like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<bitmap xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

    android:src="?android:attr/selectableItemBackground" ></bitmap>

and using this as the background directly but this does not work either. Looking at aliases they are onlyment to ref actual images so this makes sense

EDIT 2

another test an I have found using it directly

android:background="?android:attr/selectableItemBackground"

does actually work. So it seems that using it inside a alias or selector is where it gets unhappy. Strange as i would assume that both background and the same arg

EDIT 3

It seems the theme attr i was pointing at was actually a selector instelf, which im sure didnt help the issue! Thought i wouldve guessed looking at the name of it