Very useful!
I tried it and I have a question.
How can I change the characteristics of the brushing line in a plot (width, size of markers) permanently?
I want these to be valid for every plot I edit and use the brush mode.
I see the default settings are widthline 2.5 pixels and marker’s size 6 for the brushline.
Thank you!

@Lux – unfortunately, brushed lines are implemented in Matlab as simple line plots. Therefore, they share the same default characteristics as the standard line plots and so you cannot change them only for brushed lines.

You can change the defaults for all lines using:

set(0,'DefaultLineMarkerSize',10);  % 6 => 10
set(0,'DefaultLineLineWidth', 4);  % 2.5 => 4

Thank you! It worked.
I created an m file with these two commands and I put it in the target in the shortcut tab of Matlab properties
(matlab icon, right click, properties) so as the settings to be adjusted automatically every time I start Matlab.

Amazing.. thanks.. solved a problem that had been vexing me for too long..

hello, really usefull!!
only one question: suppose I have like 4 plot in a panel, with overlapped axes on left and right (each plot is a class with linked data….etc etc). Now i have like 7 or more lines with a specific tag (like: line1,line2,line3…). If I brush the ‘line2’ ‘line4’ and ‘line6′, and then I use: hBrushLine = findall(handleOfFigure,’tag’,’Brushing’), how can I understand to which line is referred the brush?
Is there a method to set the tag to the brushing object when it is created? like: brushLine2….

hope I was clear
thank you very much!!
marco

Here’s a way to directly access the brushing lineseries handle of a plot lineseries:

appdata = getappdata(line1);
brushingHandle = appdata.Brushing__.SelectionHandles;

This works on the R2011b pre-release that I’m currently using – I’m not sure if it also works on older releases.

I didn’t know anything about data brushing, It’s quite useful, and makes my job much more simple. Thanks again for your posts.

[…] data-cursor mode shares many similarities in behavior and programming code with the other plot modes (zoom, pan, data-brushing, etc.). At any one time, only a single such mode can be active in any figure window […]

I am developing a GUI for viewing large amounts of data: currently about 250 plots, but this will go up. I have two axes in this figure with many other options. I plot all data sets in the upper plot during initialization and then use the ‘Visible’ option for determining which plots are seen. When I click one of these plots in the upper axis it appears in the lower axis. In this lower axis the user has the option to select a peak using brushing. The brushed data is then fit to some function. At this point I would like to remove the brushed data programmatically. To do this I get the function handle for the ‘Clear all brushing’ item in the uicontextmenu that pops up when you right-click on brushed data:

%Get the callbacks to the context menu options
BrushingCallbacks = get(get(findall(gcf,'tag','BrushSeriesContextMenu'),'children'),'callback')
BrushingCallbacks = 
    {2x1 cell}
    [function_handle]
    @datamanager.paste 
    @datamanager.newvar
    {3x1 cell}
    {3x1 cell}
    '' 
%the first cell area has the function handle to the 'clear all brushing', as far as I know.
ClearBrushingData = BrushingCallbacks{1}{2}; %assign the function handle
ClearBrushingData(gcf); %clear all brushed data

This, however, is not working. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

@James – try using the ^[15] rather than invoking the callback function directly

hgfeval worked very nicely, thank you! In the end, I found it was a bit faster to have the user select a region of interest (ROI) using ginput and then use a function called “draggable.m”–from the FEX–to make the ROI movable in the axis. I am very glad to know of hgfeval for the future though!

Hi i was wondering how the access to the brushed data works when the brush is used multiple times. It seems to me that

hBrushLine = findall(gca,'tag','Brushing');
brushedData = get(hBrushLine, {'Xdata','Ydata'});
brushedIdx = ~isnan(brushedData{1});
brushedXData = brushedData{1}(brushedIdx);
brushedYData = brushedData{2}(brushedIdx);

only gives the brush indices of the most recent brush usage.
Lets say you have one (or multiple) curve in a plot like:

figure; plot([1:100],[1:100],'*')

and you use the brush twice to delete the first ten and the last ten points. I would like to access the XData and YData of the still visible datapoints. The mentioned code only gives the most recent usage of the brushed data (so in this example the deleted last 10 points). I couldn’t see so far how i can access all the brush instances.

How does this scale if you have n curves?

figure; plot([1:100],[1:100],'*'); hold on; 
plot([1:100],2*[1:100],'*'); 
plot([1:100],3*[1:100],'*');
...

Thanks a lot

Since Matlab R2014b this method doesn’t seem to work anymore.

hBrushLine is empty after running the following code:

hBrushLine = findall(gca,'tag','Brushing');

best regards

@bash0r – in HG2 (R2014b+), you can access the brushing data using the plot line’s hidden BrushHandles property, as follows:

hBrushHandles = hLine.BrushHandles;
hBrushChildrenHandles = hBrushHandles.Children;  % Marker, LineStrip

I described the new Marker objects ^[16], and LineStrip objects ^[17]. The brushed vertex data can be retrieved from either of them. For example:

>> hBrushChildrenHandles(1).VertextData
ans = 
     1     2     3     4   % X-data of 4 data points
     1     2     3     4   % Y-data of 4 data points
     0     0     0     0   % Z-data of 4 data points

If you only need the brushed data points (not the handles for the Markers and LineStrip, you can get them directly from the line handle, using the hidden BrushData property:

>> brushedIdx = logical(hLine.BrushData);  % logical array
>> brushedXData = hLine.XData(brushedIdx);
>> brushedYData = hLine.YData(brushedIdx)
brushedYData =
     1     2     3     4

i try this for getting the brush data in matlab 15b but it is now working.
why?.

@Rahul – the code that I posted above works well even in R2016b

Great article! Any suggestions for setting the brush data programmatically? For example, to display all the points that meet a certain criteria?

You can set the brush data using the set command with your line handle, just like you would set the XData or YData.

set(hLine,'BrushData',xxx)

Shalom Yair!
I have a GUI that I would like to have the interactive option of deleting scatter points with Brush function. My code is:

h = brush;
set(h, 'Enable', 'on', 'color', 'c');
pause
brushedIdx = logical(handles.hScatter.BrushData);  % handles.hScatter is the scatter plot handle
brushedXData = hLine.XData(brushedIdx);

It seems like the pause is just not working. If I debug and put a breakpoint after the pause it jumps right to it without letting me grab the brush data.

I used brush with pause in matlab 2013 (with the findall(gca,’tag’,’Brushing’); to get the brush data) and it worked fine. I’ll mention that the GUI is a child GUI and it has uiwait in the openning function (Maybe it is related but in matlab 2013 it did’nt bother).

Thank you very much for your help!

Nimrod

Thanks! What a great article. Your update in the comments for R2104b+ saved me. How do you find hidden line properties like BrushData?

@Bill – ^[18]

@Yair Altman
findall(gca,’tag’,’Brushing’) returns zero on my machine. I’m using R2016b.

@Eric – see my comment above: ^[19]

Hello,
Is there a way to access brushed data for Scatters in Matlab 2015b? I was able to get it to work in 2012a using your first method described above, but your method described in “Updates for HG2 (R2014b+)” doesn’t seem to work. I tried the following, with the following results:

>> hl.BrushHandles
No appropriate method, property, or field 'BrushHandles' for class 'matlab.graphics.axis.Axes'.
 
>> get(hl,'BrushData')
Error using matlab.graphics.axis.Axes/get
There is no BrushData property on the Axes class.

Just to reiterate, this is specifically for scatters, not plots.

Thanks!

@ZR – if you read my article carefully you will see that BrushHandles and BrushData are properties of the line object (which is returned by the plot or line or scatter functions) – not of the axes object.