Hi, Yair,

Thanks for your reply, and above all, thanks for the continuous stream of pearls you provide…

I would like to use the get() method for two reasons:
– symmetry: it has some aesthetic appeal, feels natural to me;
– laziness: it would allow the use of auto-complete…

not very strong reasons, specially since recent versions of Matlab provide auto-complete of property names in set/get, but still prompted me to write this function:

function hprops=getset(h)
% Returns only the settable properties for the handle graphics object h, so
% that it can be used directly in the form:
% set(h,hprops)

fn=fieldnames(set(h(1)));
fv=get(h,fn);
hprops=cell2struct(fv',fn,1);

Unfortunately, although this works for a vector of handles, of same type, returning a vector struct, this can’t be used in set(...):

hlines=findobj(gca,'Type','line');
lineprops=getset(hlines);
lineprops(1).LineStyle=':';
lineprops(2).LineStyle='-';
set(hlines,lineprops)

since only the last value specified for each property is used, and applied to all handle graphics objects…

A syntax for assigning different values to properties of multiple objects is available for the plot(...) function, which accepts the following:

plot(1:4, [2,4,5,8], 'r',...
     1:4, [3 2 1 4], 'g')

My preferred way of working with handle graphics is to use hg objects instead of handles, although in some cases it requires some additional steps:

hline=hg.line('XData',1:4,'YData',[2,4,5,8]);
hline.Visible=false;
hline.XData=[hline.XData,5];
hline.YData=[hline.YData,3];
hline.Visible=true;
% or:
[hline.XData,hline.YData]=deal([hline.XData,5],[hline.YData,3]);

Which method (set(…) with PV pairs, set(…) with struct, or hg objects) do you prefer?

@Miguel – why not simply pass to set only the changed properties, that you can be certain are settable? For example:

hprops = [];
hprops.some_property1 = ...
hprops.some_property2 = ...
set(h,hprops)

hprops=get(h);
hprops.some_property=...
set(h,hprops)

but unfortunately get(h) returns read-only properties, which result in an error when used with set():

>> set(hl,linep)
??? Error using ==> set
Attempt to modify a property that is read-only.
Object Name :  line
Property Name :  'Annotation'.

Do you know how to overcome this?

@Eric – both line, patch and inputparser are internal functions whose contents are not accessible for us to check.