Thanks a lot for your posts!
I’m currently beginning to create my first really big Matlab GUI and I still dont know, if I should use the new App Designer. The new App Designer has some very cool features, however, it also offers not the full functionality of the old programmatically way. For instance, no menu bar is available in App Designer, which is really annoying…
Maybe you could share your opinion on the pros and cons of App Designer in future posts, or maybe you find even an undocumented menu bar 😉
Anyway, thumbs up for your blog!
Ben

@Ben – at the moment, using programmatic GUI creation that relies on the old Java frame enables far greater customizability and functionality than the new web-based uifigures created by AppDesigner (AD). AD does offer an easy-to-use GUI layout editor and a few nice-looking widgets (knobs, dials and switches), but it also [currently] lacks many important functionalities compared to the old figures and controls. Moreover, if you know how to programmatically create and modify Matlab GUIs then you don’t need AD’s widgets, and if you know how to integrate Java widgets in Matlab GUIs then you could use one of the zillion widgets available online. So in essence, AppDesigner is excellent for simple GUI development, but not [currently] for highly-polished professional-looking GUIs.

That being said, AppDesigner is constantly being improved with each Matlab release. I’m almost certain that menus and toolbars will be added to uifigures soon. At some point in the near future I expect AD to be at least as powerful and useful as programmatic JFrame-based GUIs. There would always be some stuff that we would never be able to do with uifigures, but the time will soon come when AD and uifigure‘s benefits will outweigh those limitations. My guesstimate is that we’re ~1 year away from that point for simple GUIs, and ~2 years away for most advanced GUIs.

Of course, the importance of various features is different for different users, so for some users the balance point may have already arrived, and for others it may never arrive…

Thanks a lot for your thoughts!

If anybody is interested in a comparison of App Designer vs Standard figures in 2016a, I recommend these links here:

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Ben

Update: if you are running MATLAB 2017a, you can reach the FCE properties in this way:

warning off MATLAB:structOnObject
figProps = struct(app.UIFigure);
controller = figProps.Controller;
controllerProps = struct(controller);
platformHost = controllerProps.PlatformHost;
platformHostProps = struct(platformHost);
win = platformHostProps.CEF;

Enjoy hacking AppDesigner 😉

Dear Davide Miani,

According to your update, I can change the ico to my own ico file by:

win.Icon = 'D:\working\SoftwareCopyright\making\ms\ERP_Pre\tosong\erp.ico';

But I find it did not work when I added the following code to function startupFcn(app)

% Code that executes after component creation
function startupFcn(app)
    figProps = struct(app.UIFigureERP);         
    controller = figProps.Controller;
    controllerProps = struct(controller);
    platformHost = controllerProps.PlatformHost;
    platformHostProps = struct(platformHost);
    win = platformHostProps.CEF;
    win.Icon = 'D:\working\SoftwareCopyright\making\ms\ERP_Pre\tosong\erp.ico';
end

Hl Shi,

by installing the 1 sec pause, I was able to get the controller array loaded. Otherwise it is empty. Still poking around with it however it did work. just set MyICO to your ‘Filename.ico’ file. Note: must use correct file format. Java would let you use a png but this is an easy conversion.

warning('off','MATLAB:structOnObject');
pause(1);
figProps = struct(FigHand);
controller = figProps.Controller;
controllerProps = struct(controller);
platformHost = controllerProps.PlatformHost;
platformHostProps = struct(platformHost);
win = platformHostProps.CEF;
win.Icon = [pwd '\' MyICO];

Hi everyone, I’m having trouble creating a mlapp that has a popup that is a mlapp also.
So in other others I have 2 appdesigner apps… “main” and “popup”.
when I press a button on the main I want the popup to well.. popup.. and act as a modal window…
so I cant continue using the main app until I close the popup one.

I tried messing around with the:

win.setWindowAsModal(true);

with no luck… can someone give me some tips? 😉

Hi I have a similar issue. Did you find a workaround for this?

try to use the waitfor function

It seems the`Container` is removed. I see this error in R2019b:

container = controllerProps.Container;
Reference to non-existent field 'Container'.

Matlab recently modified the internal structure. You can now access the web-window (CEF) object as follows:

hFig = uifigure(...);
warning off MATLAB:structOnObject      % suppress warning (yes, we know it's naughty...)
figProps = struct(hFig);
controller = figProps.Controller;      % Controller is a private hidden property of Figure
controllerProps = struct(controller);
try  % up to R2019a
    container = controllerProps.Container;
catch  % R2019b or newer
    container = controllerProps.PlatformHost;
end
win = container.CEF;

The other mechanisms described in the post, namely using matlab.internal.webwindowmanager methods, still work to this day:

webWindows = matlab.internal.webwindowmanager.instance.findAllWebwindows();  % manager method returning an array of all open webwindows
webWindows = matlab.internal.webwindowmanager.instance.windowList;           % equivalent alternative via manager's windowList property

Hi Yair,
Thank you for digging into this. It seems I need following to get CEF

container = struct(controllerProps.PlatformHost);

This is fantastic! Thanks everyone!
To get access to CEF on 2019b, I had to take the advise of Jeffery Devereux and Xiangrui Li.

warning off MATLAB:structOnObject      % suppress warning (yes, we know it's naughty...)
drawnow;
figProps = struct(app.UIFigure);
controller = figProps.Controller;      % Controller is a private hidden property of Figure
controllerProps = struct(controller);
try  % up to R2019a
    container = controllerProps.Container;
catch  % R2019b or newer
    container = struct(controllerProps.PlatformHost);
end
drawnow;
win = container.CEF;

Is there a way to intergrade the toolstrip or toolgroup (java based) to the uifigure? I am trying to figure out if I should go for the undocumented toolgroup or App Designer. App Designer seems to be improved a lot and the editor is nice, but I also like the look of toolstrip. I feel that these two should be able to co-exist. We are able to use all the toolgroup app (PIDTuner etc…) on matlab-online so I assume there is a way to render the java based app to web-based(?).

thanks

@Paul – There must be a way to use a toolstrip in uifigures, because many Matlab apps use uifigures with a toolstrip. But I have not [yet] discovered how to add a toolstrip to uifigures – only to Java-based windows (tool-group and regular figures).

Mathworks has indeed been migrating its Java-based apps (like the PIDtuner, as you mentioned) to html-based ones (uifigures) so that they can be used in Matlab online. If you drill a bit into the code of any of these apps you will find that they are using an AppContainer object which already has a toolstrip (empty) attached. Toolstrip elements have the same syntax as the ones used in Java apps:

% Create the app
app = matlab.ui.container.internal.AppContainer();

% Create a tabgroup with a tab
tabGroup = matlab.ui.internal.toolstrip.TabGroup();
tab = matlab.ui.internal.toolstrip.Tab();
tabGroup.Tag = 'myTabGroup';
tab.Tag = 'myTab';
tab.Title = 'Tab#1';

% Add tab to group and group to app
tabGroup.add(tab);
app.addTabGroup(tabGroup);

% Make app visible
app.Visible = true;

I’d 100% recommend you to work with this AppContainer, since it offers more possibilities than the normal Java-based one. Besides the toolstrip (same syntax as for Java, so Yairs 9 posts on it should still be relevant), you can insert uifigures as draggable panels to the left/right/bottom of the app (way better than the java-based DataBrowser) and control the layout of the app grid. Plus, you can use custom html/javascript objects (using the uihtml component) inside the app which in my view are easier to code and customize.

Only downside is that everything is undocumented and you’d need to investigate a lot on the AppContainer API. I have already looked my fair bit into it, so I could probably help

Any ideas on why this bit of code looks fine in say R2020b but produces an incorrect image in R2019b? I’m not seeing any error printouts that suggest it’s unhappy with the inputs.

It is not clear from your comment which code exactly you are referring to and what you see differently in 19b vs. 20b, so I cannot assist with your specific query.
In general I can say that it is not surprising that undocumented things that work in one Matlab release don’t work exactly the same way on a different release.

I apologize, I intended my response to fall under ‘T’ but did not seem to work.

I was referring to the bit of code posted by ‘T’ regarding the toolgroup and appcontainer. If I run that snippet of code they posted in R2019b, the figure generated is all wrong, but works fine in R2020b. I have the deep learning toolbox and their Deep Network Designer tool (which looks fine in R2019b and R2020b) very much appears to be built on an AppContainer type framework , however when drilling through the source code there’s not much to go on, and it’s not even like they p-coded or encrypted it. It seems like maybe it’s javascript based, but even searching through that bit of code I can’t find terms that match buttons in the TabGroup. I was more or less just looking for examples on how to build out the appcontainer into a more formidable GUI, was at least able to figure out how to add Figures to panels and tabbed figures, probably sufficient for moving forward. R2019b would be a nice to have but maybe too much of a leap in versions for these features.

Hey @Kevin, can you share your code about create group of figures in the AppContainer? The container of multiples uifigures could be an amazing improvement over AppDesigner and its only uifigure, opening a lot of possibilities…

Hey Yair, I think your site is the right place to share that I wrote ccTools, a lib that allows a lot of customizations of Matlab built-in web components (such as uifigure, uitable, uibutton and so on). It works at least from R2021b.
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