Comments on: Legend ‘-DynamicLegend’ semi-documented feature

By: Customizing menu items part 1 | Undocumented Matlab

Customizing menu items part 1 | Undocumented Matlab — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:14:22 +0000

[...] Menu callbacks generally use internal semi-documented functions (i.e., having a readable help section but no doc, online help, or official support) [...]

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:27:45 +0000

@Stephan – yes: You can access the Refresh uicontextmenu item (and any other context-menu item) directly from the legend axes, and then run it via the hgfeval function, as follows:

hLegend = findall(gcf,'tag','legend');
uic = get(hLegend,'UIContextMenu');
uimenu_refresh = findall(uic,'Label','Refresh');
callback = get(uimenu_refresh,'Callback');
hgfeval(callback,[],[]);

For the record, this invokes the refresh_cb function within %matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/scribe/@scribe/@legend/methods.m. You can place a breakpoint there to see exactly what it does internally.

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:41:29 +0000

@Teodor - try placing a drawnow after plotting the lines and before trying to access the hidden ScribeLegendListeners property. It is also possible that you are trying to access this property on a handle of another object (maybe one of the line plots, or a figure, or another axes), rather than the handle of the axes that holds the plots for the requested legend.

By: Teodor

Teodor — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:26:11 +0000

Hi. Thank you for this post. At the moment I am a bit stuck as trying to get the ‘ScribeLegendListeners’ throws a ‘MATLAB:class:InvalidProperty’ exception. There seem to be no such property…

My University is using Matlab-R2011a. Could it be something related to their installation?

What I am doing is using -DynamicLegend for plotting data in multiple iterations. However, I need to remove from the legend some plotted lines.

Could you recommend other solutions? Thank you.

By: sunny

sunny — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:40:26 +0000

wow, i never knew there was a function like this and i have been thinking on how to program it. thanks, this is gonna save me lots of time

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:47:42 +0000

@Stephan and @Andy - the Legend's DynamicLegend functionality only listens to newly-created axes children (in %matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/scribe/@scribe/@legend/init.m line 102 [for R2012aPR]), and axes children deletions (in %matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/scribe/@scribe/@legend/methods.m line 1281 [R2012aPR again]).It should be relatively easy to modify any of these two places to listen to changes in the Visible property of axes children. I described the mechanism for doing this in several articles (here for example).

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:41:00 +0000

I got the same Problem/Question as Stephan I do plot all data in the Fig however only some data is visible but in the legend all data even the one not visible is listed. Only by right klick an refresh I can get rid of them however I can’t do that with every single file….

Hope there will be a solution in the future.

By: Stephan

Stephan — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:18:14 +0000

I was searching for a way to use a legend’s “refresh” function (that is available when right-clicking on the legend with the mouse) in a script. When I came across this post I first thought this was the way Matlab implemented the “refresh” functionality.
However, ‘DynamicLegend’ only seems to react to additions or deletions to the axes: switching the ‘Visibility’ of a line to ‘off’ or switching the legend entry off by

set(get(get(line_handle,'Annotation'),'LegendInformation'),'IconDisplayStyle','off')

is ignored by the ‘DynamicLegend’ feature. The “refresh” function correctly removes the corresponding legend entry in these cases.
Do you know how to use “refresh” from the command line?

By: Uitable sorting | Undocumented Matlab

Uitable sorting | Undocumented Matlab — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:03:51 +0000

[...] After many years in which the uitable was available but semi-documented and not officially supported in Matlab, it finally became fully documented and supported in R2008a [...]

By: handle2struct, struct2handle & Matlab 8.0 | Undocumented Matlab

handle2struct, struct2handle & Matlab 8.0 | Undocumented Matlab — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:02:59 +0000

[...] under the hood, hgsave uses the semi-documented built-in handle2struct function to convert the figure handle into a Matlab struct [...]