android.view.InflateException when using selectableItemBackground

When inflating my layout, I get this exception:

E AndroidRuntime: android.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #11: Binary XML file line #11: Error inflating class <unknown>
E AndroidRuntime:        at android.view.LayoutInflater.inflate(LayoutInflater.java:539)
E AndroidRuntime:        at android.view.LayoutInflater.inflate(LayoutInflater.java:423)
E AndroidRuntime:        at com.myapp.view.MyRecyclerAdapter.onCreateViewHolder(MyRecyclerAdapter:80)
E AndroidRuntime:        at android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView$Adapter.createViewHolder(RecyclerView.java:5288)
E AndroidRuntime:        at android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView$Recycler.getViewForPosition(RecyclerView.java:4551)
E AndroidRuntime:        at android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView$Recycler.getViewForPosition(RecyclerView.java:4461)
E AndroidRuntime:        at android.support.v7.widget.LinearLayoutManager$LayoutState.next(LinearLayoutManager.java:1962)

There is no "Caused by" in the log, but I added code to catch the exception and call getCause() until it returns null, and here is the sequence of events:

android.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #11: Binary XML file line #11: Error inflating class <unknown>
android.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #11: Error inflating class <unknown>
Error: Binary XML file line #11: Error inflating class <unknown>
android.content.res.Resources$NotFoundException: File res/drawable-v11/selectable_list_background.xml from drawable resource ID #0x7f020096
java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Failed to resolve attribute at index 0: TypedValue{t=0x2/d=0x7f0100f9 a=-1}

0x7f020096 is selectable_list_background (see below), and the TypedValue it references is ?selectableItemBackground.

I narrowed the exception down to my use of ?selectableItemBackground. More specifically, I'm using a CardView:

<android.support.v7.widget.CardView
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:foreground="@drawable/selectable_list_background"
    card_view:cardCornerRadius="4dp"
    card_view:cardElevation="4dp"
    >

And this the relevant part of drawable/selectable_list_background:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:drawable="?selectableItemBackground" />
</selector>

This activity is using my own theme, its parent is Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar.

This code used to work, but I just dug up this code after a few months, and now it crashes with the exception. My guess is that this is related to upgrading the support library to 23.0.1 and target SDK to 23, but I haven't switched back to 22 yet to verify that.

It all works fine if I remove the one line referencing ?selectableItemBackground. I also tried ?attr/selectableItemBackground and ?android:attr/selectableItemBackground, but got the same results. (The latter makes me believe that it may not be a problem with the support library).

EDIT:

I looked at it in the debugger, and I have a suspicion that it is this code in android.content.res.Resources, inside loadDrawable():

Drawable loadDrawable(TypedValue value, int id, Theme theme) throws NotFoundException {
    [...]
    dr = loadDrawableForCookie(value, id, null);

Note that this function takes a theme, but doesn't pass it in when calling loadDrawableForCookie(), which is the method that eventually triggers the first exception:

java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Failed to resolve attribute at index 0: TypedValue{t=0x2/d=0x7f0100f9 a=-1}
    at android.content.res.TypedArray.getDrawable(TypedArray.java:867)
    at android.graphics.drawable.StateListDrawable.inflateChildElements(StateListDrawable.java:170)
    at android.graphics.drawable.StateListDrawable.inflate(StateListDrawable.java:115)
    at android.graphics.drawable.Drawable.createFromXmlInner(Drawable.java:1215)
    at android.graphics.drawable.Drawable.createFromXml(Drawable.java:1124)
    at android.content.res.Resources.loadDrawableForCookie(Resources.java:2630)
    at android.content.res.Resources.loadDrawable(Resources.java:2540)
    at android.content.res.TypedArray.getDrawable(TypedArray.java:870)
    at android.view.View.<init>(View.java:4280)

This code seems to be new to Android 6.0 - the 5.0 code is quite different, but the theme is passed in when loading the drawable. And the theme is necessary AFAICT - the attribute in question is part of AppCompat, so it needs the activity's theme to resolve it.

That seems like a blatant bug though, so I'm not convinced that I'm on the right track here. Any ideas?

The official answer - you can't use theme attributes for android:drawable or android:src attributes. Simply not possible, by design. There's another answer that explores the same issue and offers a solution: How to reference style attributes from a drawable?

In my case, I couldn't really do that since AppCompat's ?selectableItemBackground references a private drawable. So I opted for a code solution - I'm setting the foreground to ?selectableItemBackground while the card is not selected, and to my own state list drawable once I'm in selection mode.

This is a very ugly solution, so ugly that I'm not going to share the code here, but the best I could come up with so far. If somebody has a better solution, I'd love to hear it.