Panel-level uicontrols

In one of my larger Matlab applications – Integration-lab Debriefing System (IDS, which shall be described in a future dedicated article) – I wanted to present a panel-level checkbox that applies to the entire panel contents. In my particular case, the IDS uipanel contained a Java table (another future topic) with multiple selectable rows, and I needed a global checkbox that selects all (or none) of them at once:

Panel-level ("Objects") checkbox

One way to do this is to calculate the checkbox’s desired position relative to the uipanel and place a regular checkbox-style uicontrol there. The checkbox can even be made a child of the uipanel with ‘normalized’ units, thereby moving and resizing it together with its uipanel parent when the later is moved or resized.

But there’s a much simpler method that want to share. It relies on the undocumented fact that the uipanel‘s title label is a simple hidden uicontrol child of the uipanel handle. This uicontrol handle can be found and simply transformed from a ‘style’='text’ control into a ‘style’='checkbox’ control, as follows:

% Prepare the panel
hPanel = uipanel('position',[0.2,0.2,0.4,0.4], 'title','Objects');
 
% Get the title label's handle
warning off MATLAB:Uipanel:HiddenImplementation  % turn off warning
hTitle = setdiff(findall(hPanel),hPanel);  % retrieve title handle
hTitle = get(hPanel,'TitleHandle');  % alternative, uses hidden prop
 
% Modify the uicontrol style; add 20 pixel space for the checkbox
newPos = get(hTitle,'position') + [0,0,20,0];  % in pixels
set(hTitle, 'style','checkbox', 'value',1, 'pos',newPos);

Panel-level checkbox

Note that we can retrieve the title handle using either the uipanel‘s hidden property TitleHandle, or by scanning the panel’s children using findall. I prefer the TitleHandle approach because it does not require modification (minor as it might be) when the panel already contains other children.

The down-side is that since TitleHandle is an undocumented hidden property, it may change its name, its behavior or even be removed in some future Matlab release. In fact, there’s even a Matlab warning about this, unless you turn it off using:

warning off MATLAB:Uipanel:HiddenImplementation

We can use this approach for more complex options panels, as the following example illustrates. Here, we set radio-button controls rather than a checkbox control, and also modify the title color to blue:

% Main panel and basic alternative control
hPanelMain = uipanel('pos',[.1,.1,.8,.8], 'Title','Main', 'units','norm');
hAlt1 = uicontrol('parent',hPanelMain, 'units','norm', 'pos',[.1,.8,.5,.1], 'style','radio', 'string','Alternative #1');
 
% Alternative options panel #2
hAlt2 = uipanel('parent',hPanelMain, 'units','norm', 'pos',[.07,.4,.5,.35], 'title','Alternative #2');
hAlt2Title = get(hAlt2, 'TitleHandle');
newPos = get(hAlt2Title,'position') + [0,0,20,0];  % in pixels
set(hAlt2Title, 'style','radio', 'pos',newPos);
hAlt2a = uicontrol('parent',hAlt2, 'units','norm', 'pos',[.2,.6,.7,.3], 'style','checkbox', 'string','Option 1');
hAlt2b = uicontrol('parent',hAlt2, 'units','norm', 'pos',[.2,.2,.7,.3], 'style','checkbox', 'string','Option 2');
 
% Alternative options panel #3
hAlt3 = uipanel('parent',hPanelMain, 'units','norm', 'pos',[.07,.05,.5,.3], 'title','Alternative #3');
hAlt3Title = get(hAlt3, 'TitleHandle');
newPos = get(hAlt3Title,'position') + [0,0,20,0];  % in pixels
set(hAlt3Title, 'style','radio', 'pos',newPos, 'ForegroundColor','blue');
hAlt3a = uicontrol('parent',hAlt3, 'units','norm', 'pos',[.2,.5,.7,.3], 'style','popup', 'string',{'Option 3a','Option 3b','Option 3c'});

Advanced panel-level controls

Note that since the hAlt2Title and hAlt3Title radio-buttons are children of their respective uipanel parents, we cannot use a simple uibuttongroup to group them in a mutual-exclusion group. Instead, we must use a dedicated callback function. This is actually quite easy:

% Set the callback for all relevant radio-buttons
hButtonGroup = [hAlt1, hAlt2Title, hAlt3Title];
set(hButtonGroup, 'Callback', {@SelectionCb, hButtonGroup});
 
% This is the callback function that manages mutual exclusion
function SelectionCb(hSrc,hEvent,hButtonGroup)
   otherButtons = setdiff(hButtonGroup,hSrc);
   set(otherButtons,'value',0);
   set(hSrc,'value',1);  % needed to prevent de-selection
end

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