It is often useful to include hyperlinked text labels in GUIs. Such labels provide single-click access to important functionality, improve branding, and are non-intrusive action controls having a lower visual impact than a full-blown button. There are several ways that we can display such hyperlinks in Matlab GUIs, and today I will show one of my favorites.
The basic idea is to create a Java text label control whose label displays an HTML link. The control is modified to change the mouse cursor when it hovers over the hyperlink, and a mouse-click callback is set to open the hyperlink target in the system browser:

% Create and display the text label
url = 'UndocumentedMatlab.com';
labelStr = ['More info: ' url ''];
jLabel = javaObjectEDT('javax.swing.JLabel', labelStr);
[hjLabel,hContainer] = javacomponent(jLabel, [10,10,250,20], gcf);
% Modify the mouse cursor when hovering on the label
hjLabel.setCursor(java.awt.Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(java.awt.Cursor.HAND_CURSOR));
% Set the label's tooltip
hjLabel.setToolTipText(['Visit the ' url ' website']);
% Set the mouse-click callback
set(hjLabel, 'MouseClickedCallback', @(h,e)web(['http://' url], '-browser'))

Note the visual illusion here: we do not directly click the hyperlink (note that its href is empty), but rather the label control. The end-result is the same.
Also note that this technique could be used to easily display clickable icons/images, including animated and transparent GIFs, by simply setting the label’s HTML string to display the relevant image. I have already shown how to do this in another post ^[1]. Uses could range from clickable logo images to clickable help icons.
We could also use a flat (borderless) button. I have already posted related articles about button customizations in Matlab GUIs (here ^[2], here ^[3] and here ^[4]). In fact, I have already shown how we can use borderless buttons in Matlab axes ^[4] to display a non-obtrusive control for controlling plot properties. The code would be very similar to the above, except that we would use a JButton rather than a JLabel, and also need to setBorder([]) and similar button-specific modifications. Buttons have a bit more functionality and customizability than simple text labels; the appearance would be the same, but the extra customizability may be handy in very special cases, although not for most use-cases.
One of the benefits of using either JLabels or JButtons is that they enable multiple callbacks ^[5] (e.g., FocusGained,FocusLost) and properties (e.g., VerticalAlignment,ToolTipText) that the standard Matlab text uicontrol does not provide (not to mention their builtin ability to display HTML, which Matlab’s uicontrol text labels do not posses).

5 Comments To "Hyperlink text labels"

#1 Comment By Yaroslav On October 21, 2015 @ 09:03

...
jLabel = javaObjectEDT('javax.swing.JLabel', labelStr);
...

#2 Comment By Yair Altman On October 21, 2015 @ 09:16

#3 Comment By oussama On August 27, 2016 @ 01:43

#4 Comment By Yair Altman On August 27, 2016 @ 22:51

#5 Comment By پروژه متلب On November 13, 2016 @ 00:08