True, we add java peers and not uicontrol handles themselves, but at the end of the day it does allow us to effectively manage the layout of arbitrary uicontrols (and java components) using flexible Java layout managers, which, I think, not a lot of people realize.
Btw, thanks for all your great utilities and tips : )

@nirvana – this is correct, but what you are essentially doing is adding a Java component to a Java container – you are not adding the Matlab uicontrol. In this respect, using the underlying Java peer (via findjobj) is bypassing this limitation. Unfortunately, axes do not have similar Java peers that can be manipulated in a similar manner – they do have a Java canvas that can be accessed, but it extends over the entire figure’s ContentPane (in theory you could try to resize that canvas and add it to the JContainer, but odd things might result…).

Isn’t this statement incorrect?

Just remember the limitation that no Matlab component (such as GUI controls or plot axes) can be added to Java containers.

You cannot add axes, but you can manage a mixture of java components and uicontrols using swing layout mangers. You just need to add the corresponding java handles of uicontrol objects to your java container.

E.g. here’s an example applying a BoxLayout with a horizontal glue to a couple of uicontrol buttons:

parent = figure();
jPanel = javaObjectEDT('javax.swing.JPanel');

jPanel.setLayout(javax.swing.BoxLayout(jPanel,javax.swing.BoxLayout.X_AXIS));

hButton = uicontrol('String', 'Button 1');
jButton = findjobj(hButton);
jPanel.add(jButton);

jPanel.add(javax.swing.Box.createHorizontalGlue());

hButton2 = uicontrol('String', 'Button 2');
jButton2 = findjobj(hButton2);
jPanel.add(jButton2(1));

parentPixelPos = getpixelposition(parent);
[~, hContainer] = javacomponent(jPanel, [1, 1, parentPixelPos(3), parentPixelPos(4)], parent);
set(hContainer, 'Units', 'normalized');

I don’t really see much point using uiflowcontainer and alike. GUI Layout toolbox is perfect for most of the tasks, and when you need a fine-grained control of uicontrol, layout you can use the technique above (mixing them with java components if required).

You can use the GridSize and Position properties (default values = [1,1] and [0,0,1,1] meaning 100% in both directions, when Units='normalized')

I am not aware of the ability to inherit multiple UDD superclasses, but this is not the same as saying that it’s not possible. Perhaps Donn Shull knows how to do it. I’d start looking in Donn’s article on UDD inheritance.

In uicomponent I wanted to merge the properties of the Java object and the Matlab container. So I took one of them and simply added to it (dynamically, using schema.prop) the properties of the other. Whenever I added such a dynamic property, I also overrode the new property’s set method and added handle.listeners, so that the original and the new properties would be linked, such that modifying any of them in run-time would automatically update the other. All this is done in a loop over the properties, so it is quite efficient and generic. Look at the source code of uicomponent for details – it’s well documented.

The problem with adding properties to existing UDD handles, is that one must redefine all the new properties; I want to merge two UDD classes (double inheritance, etc.). Is it possible?

@Yaroslav – take a look at my uicomponent utility and how it adds properties to existing UDD handles via the schema.prop function.

Note that unfortunately this feature is no longer available in the upcoming HG2.

For more information on UDD inheritance, read this.