@Santiago – AFAIK you cannot parent a Matlab uimenu or uitoolbar to a uitab. However, you can add Java components (in your case, JMenuBar and JToolBar) using the javacomponent function.

However, IMHO a better alternative would be to set the uitabgroup’s SelectionChangedFcn property to a custom Matlab callback function, that would hide/show various components in the top-level (figure) menu-bar and toolbar based on the currently-selected tab.

@Sebastian – I agree that this is confusing. I am not aware of a way to avoid this.

Is there a way to avoid this behavior, so that the toolbar stays on its figure window when docked?

@Kesh – You could possibly trap the ComponentHierarchyChanged callback (or something similar) and then re-update the toolbar.

But I really don’t see this as a major issue: people rarely reorder toolbar components, and when they do it’s mostly when the GUI is first created, so it’s easy to simply update the java stuff after that point, instead of before as you have done.

I just bumped into an aggravating issue with Java toolbar components (R2014a) which I don’t think has been brought up on this site.

The problem: Java based toolbar components disappear when their ancestral figure’s Children property is permuted (including running uistack function). It appears that when figure’s Children is permuted, it invalidates jToolbar object (i.e., ComponentPeer of uitoolbar’s JavaContainer). Here is a minimum working example:

fig = figure('MenuBar','none');

% create a couple menu items
h1 = uimenu('parent',fig,'label','&File');
h2 = uimenu('parent',fig,'label','&Edit');

% add a toolbar
tb = uitoolbar('Parent',fig);

% add a black uipushtool button
uipushtool('Parent',tb,'CData',zeros(16,16,3,'uint8'));
drawnow

% add a JButton on the toolbar
jToolbar = get(get(tb,'JavaContainer'),'ComponentPeer');
jtbRun = javax.swing.JButton('JButton');
jToolbar.add(jtbRun); %1st position
jToolbar.repaint;
jToolbar.revalidate;

drawnow

fprintf('jToolbar is valid: %d\n',jToolbar.isValid())
fprintf('jtbRun is valid: %d\n',jtbRun.isValid())

h = get(fig,'Children');
set(fig,'Children',h([1 3 2]))
drawnow

fprintf('jToolbar is valid: %d\n',jToolbar.isValid())
fprintf('jtbRun is valid: %d\n',jtbRun.isValid())

Do you have any (elegant) workaround for this problem?

@Michele – you’re probably forgetting that all callbacks automatically recieve the event object handle (a double in the case of HG1) as a first parameter, and eventData as the second parameter.

The correct way to define such a callback is:

set(hButton, 'ClickedCallback', @(hButton,e) obj.myMethod(hButton));

i’m trying to run a class method trough a uipushbutton clickedcallback call.
The issue is that I get the error

Undefined function "mymethod" for input arguments of type 'double'.
Error while evaluating uipushtool ClickedCallback

I can just run normal function but this is not useful for me

@Daniel – I think the easiest solution in your case would be to use the standard Matlab figure toolbar, and simply hide those buttons that you don’t need by setting their Visible property to ‘off’.

Related: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-standard-figure-toolbar-menubar/