GUI integrated browser control

15 Responses to GUI integrated browser control

1. Ken Orr says:

   December 15, 2009 at 3:53 am

   Thanks Yair! I’ll do what I can to help influence Java on the Mac.

   Reply
2. Gunnar Ingestrom says:

   January 22, 2010 at 10:04 am

   Thanks for a great tip! I have been struggling with the limited HTML capabilities of the JEditorPane but now you gave me a solution that really works out of the box.

   Reply
3. Sid says:

   February 8, 2010 at 8:44 pm

   Hi Yair,
   Is it possible to view non-html links, say, a pdf file from within the matlab web browser? That should be without opening a new acrobat reader window.
   Thanks
   Sid

   Reply
   • Yair Altman says:

     February 9, 2010 at 2:41 am

     @Sid – I don’t think so. Even regular browsers need to use Acrobat (or another PDF reader like Foxit) to display PDF.
4. Arnaud says:

   August 18, 2010 at 4:58 am

   Hi Yair,

   I’m designing a dialog similar to a throbber, indicating that some computation is running, but autonomous, contrary to matlab’s native waitbar. In order to save CPU ressources, i try to take advantages of animated GIF. After having considered timer functions for refreshing an axes, i finaly came out to use an HTML browser that can render basic animated GIFs. Your tip provides me a great solution, however, i’m wondering how i can remove the scrollbars that appear when i set the url to any image file :

   browser.setCurrentLocation('toto.gif');

   I can’t see any method dealing with scrolling by typing :

   methodsview(browser)

   I will try to work on browser size, but i appreciate if you can provide some hints.
   Thanks.
   Arnaud

   Reply
   • Yair Altman says:

     August 18, 2010 at 9:34 am

     @Arnaud – here’s a much lighter-weight alternative:

     iconsClassName = 'com.mathworks.widgets.BusyAffordance$AffordanceSize';
     iconsSizeEnums = javaMethod('values',iconsClassName);
     SIZE_32x32 = iconsSizeEnums(2);  % (1) = 16x16
     jObj = com.mathworks.widgets.BusyAffordance(SIZE_32x32,'testing...');
     javacomponent(jObj.getComponent,[10,10,80,80],gcf);
     jObj.start;
         % do some long operation...
     jObj.stop;
   • Arnaud says:

     January 24, 2013 at 7:39 am

     Hi Yair,

     I’m just reading your response to my post I wrote… 2 years ago.
     The need for a throbber was off the radar during this time, but finaly rises again, and your piece of code is actualy exactly what I was looking for.
     Thank you for your help, and continue to keep this extremly usefull website alive.

     Arnaud
5. Yonatan says:

   October 6, 2010 at 9:29 pm

   Hi,
   This works great.
   I do have a slight problem – if the page I’m viewing has some dhtml pop up window, it shows like an error message and there’s nothing I can do – the whole program is stuck until I turn it off (click ok or something).
   Here’s an example of such a web page:
   http://www.domainscalping.com/ (simply let the page load, and then refresh the screen to see the popup).
   Is there a way to monitor such messages and handle them via the code? Or maybe disable them?
   Thanks

   Reply

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7. Ivan says:

   December 25, 2012 at 4:53 am

   Hi, Yair!
   Is it possible to track changes in browser object? For example, change listbox when we follow a link to another site.
   Thanks.
   Ivan.

   Reply
   • Yair Altman says:

     December 27, 2012 at 3:56 pm

     @Ivan – the easiest way would be to check whether the browser object (or one of its sub-components) has a built-in event (Matlab callback) that you can use. Alternatively, you could try using a property-change listener as explained here.
8. thnxtay says:

   May 2, 2013 at 12:33 pm

   I am having an issue with grabbing the HTML text from a particular website using the embedded browser. I took your code and dropped in the following URL:

   http://www.physionet.org/cgi-bin/atm/ATM

   In the “Database” drop down under the “Input” cell, select any one of the databases. It will load the data for that particular study.

   OBJECTIVE: Capture the text on the page for the time section of the study being viewed; the text in the blue bar just above the graphs (“Selected Input:”).

   PROBLEM: HTML text field in browser object is not updated after navigating away from welcome page. Need to find a way to get the HTML code that is specific to the study data that is being displayed.

   METHODS:
   1) Used uiinspect.m (http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/uiinspect/) to find the displayed HTML for the data page of the study. Can’t find any field containing the new info.
   2) Right clicked on the page and used the “Page Source” option. It shows the original welcome screen html
   3) Right clicked on the page and used the “Refresh” option. This did not update the HTML text field of the browser object. It did keep you on the study page, and did not refresh to the welcome page, even though it had to resend the POSTDATA query.
   4) Viewed the same page in Firefox and inspected the page source code. This gave me what I want; HTML code specific to the study.

   Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

   Here is the modified m-code from this post that has a link to the page that I am working with:

   % Create a blank figure window
   f = figure('Name','Browser GUI demo','Num','off','Units','norm');
    
   % Add the browser object on the right
   jObject = com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HTMLBrowserPanel;
   [browser,container] = javacomponent(jObject, [], f);
   set(container, 'Units','norm', 'Pos',[0.3,0.05,0.65,0.9]);
    
   % Add the URLs listbox on the left
   urls = {'http://www.physionet.org/cgi-bin/atm/ATM','www.bbc.co.uk','myLocalwebpage.html',...
           'www.Mathworks.com', 'UndocumentedMatlab.com'};
   hListbox = uicontrol('style','listbox', 'string',urls, ...
           'units','norm', 'pos',[0.05,0.05,0.2,0.9], ...
           'userdata',browser);
    
   % Set the listbox's callback to update the browser contents
   cbStr=['strs = get(gcbo,''string''); ' ...
         'url = strs{get(gcbo,''value'')};' ...
         'browser = get(gcbo,''userdata''); ' ...
         'msg=[''Loading '' url '' - please wait''];'...
         'browser.setHtmlText(msg); pause(0.1); drawnow;'...
         'browser.setCurrentLocation(url);'];
   set(hListbox,'Callback',cbStr);
    
   % context menu
   cmenu = uicontextmenu;
   hcb1 = ['set(f, ''Color'', [0.9 0.6 0.5])'];
   item1 = uimenu(cmenu, 'Label', 'change color', 'Callback', hcb1);
   set(container,'uicontextmenu',cmenu);

   Reply
   • Yair Altman says:

     May 28, 2013 at 5:02 pm

     @thnxtay – I suggest that you load your webpage in some external browser that has more abilities to display the inner HTML code (e.g., Firebug on FireFox). Then you’d be able to see what goes on behind the scenes and try to use this info in the more-limited Matlab browser. If you would like further assistance on a consulting basis, please contact me via email.
9. kobbi says:

   May 21, 2013 at 4:32 am

   Hi

   I tried to use the code example above, to load an html file that I have created into the GUI, but I got the following message (inside the UI browser):

   “This file exceeds the maximum size for the MATLAB Web Browser. It will open in your system browser.”

   and indeed the html was opened with in internet explorer.

   Any idea how to solve this problem?

   Thanks
   Kobbi

   Reply
   • Yair Altman says:

     May 28, 2013 at 5:39 pm

     @Kobbi – try to minify your HTML