Thank you Yair for this blog and this post. I really appreciate the insight.

You don’t mention the ^[18] that appeared on the File Exchange last month. It seems to share ancestors with Brad Phelan’s layout managers. Brad, who once worked for The Mathworks, is acknowledged.

GUI Layout Toolbox
by Ben Tordoff
(The Mathworks)

/ per

@per – my bad for the oversight – thanks for pointing it out. The GUI Layout Toolbox is indeed an excellent utility. Funny it was published only two weeks ago and I missed it…

Hi Sir,
I am a beginner in Matlab. I have saved data from the workspace into a mat file. It consists of vectors of sizes 82×3 , 32×1 … Now I intend to print it out in the form of a table. Should I convert it to excel? How should I create tables from workspace data(in the form of mat files)? Awaiting your reply.

@Chaitanya – you can use the ^[19] function to display and print data in table format in Matlab. uitable was undocumented (but available) until R2008a.

Alternately, you can display your data in the Variable (Array) Editor, using the ^[20] function:

data=magic(4); openvar('data');

[…] the returned uitabgroup object hTabGroup is actually a Matlab container (deriving from uiflowcontainer) that always displays two elements: the Java tab-group, and the active Matlab uicontainer […]

Yair, thank you for your blog. It’s very useful!

When did the Height/WidthLimits property appeared? It doesn’t seem to work in R2007b. What I get is:

??? Error using ==> set
There is no 'HeightLimits ' property in the 'uicontrol' class.


Thank you
Sim

Never mind, I just noticed that the container needed to be a uiflowcontainer. uigridcontainer does not enable the ‘HeightLimits‘ hidden property.

Sim

Well, disregard again, the error disappeared because I commented my line of code. So I still have the problem. Anyways, here’s what uiflowcontainer.m tells about these hidden properties

% properties only visible when parent is uiflowcontainer
%set([c1,c2],'HeightLimits',[20 20],'WidthLimits',[60 60])

Which is what I’m doing, but without success with R2007b.

@Simon – I’m not sure why it’s not working for you. It does work fine on my Matlab R2007b on a Windows XP platform:

hc = uiflowcontainer;
hb = uicontrol(...,'Parent',hc);
get(hb,'HeightLimits');

From your quoted error message above, I see that you called the property ‘HeightLimits ‘ (with an extra space) – perhaps this is the problem?

My error was to set the HeightLimits property at uicontrol creation, instead of using a separate set(‘HeightLimits’).

Thanks!
Simon

A little heads-up for using the uiflowcontainer object.

When the container is copied using copyobj, the WidthLimits and HeightLimits properties of its children are not copied.

And MathWorks, why oh why do you not have these limits properties implemented for uigridcontainer children??? I hope they have it on the to-do list…

Hi,

these containers are great.
One issue I’m having though is that patch objects (as e.g. used by a bar-plot) seem to have problems, when drawn in an axes which has a flow/gridcontainer as parent.
After zooming the axis, the patch-graphics which is not in the zoomed axis-range any more keeps being drawn outside the axis-area.
Surface-plots on the other hand seem to be ok…

This is in R2011b.
Has anybody else come across this problem?
It would be great if there’s a workaround…

ps:
Here’s a minimalistic example demonstrating the problem:

% create figure with 1 x 2 gridcontainer, holding 2 empty panels:
f = figure();
grid = uigridcontainer(f, 'gridsize', [1,2]);
p1 = uipanel(grid);
p2 = uipanel(grid);
    
% construct axis in 2nd panel
axes('parent', p2);

% draw a trivial line as patch-object
patch(1:10, 1:10, 'green', 'EdgeColor', 'green');

% modify axis-range
xlim([2,8]);

Hello, quick question on uipanels/button groups, how can i make one item (a radio button) with in the uipanel visible/not visible…
the code “set(handles.uibatspanel,’visible’,’off’)” makes the panel itself visible or not, but i want the radio button “raido2bats” within this panel to be visiable/not visiable

Many Thanks

Ben

set(handles.radio2bats,'Visible','off')

Hi @Yair,

Thank you for the enlightening article; I find these functions extremely useful (just the freedom of not using the 'Position' property in each control saves me a huge load of time and effort). However I find them lacking in one tiny aspect:

What I need is something like a uiflowpanel function; i.e., having the uiflowcontainer with the uipanel‘s frame and title — all in one handle-graphics object. To be more precise, I want an object, such that if I set(...) a property or use inspect(...) it, I would see all the properties of the uipanel and the uiflowcontainer together (same request extends naturally for uigridcontainer).

Currently I use a nested object scheme:

function [fch,pnh] = uiflowpanel(varargin)
% UIPANELCONTAINER Mimicking UIPanel w/ UIFlowContainer capabilities
pnh  = uipanel(varargin{:});
fch  = uiflowcontainer('Parent',pnh,'Units','normalized','Position',[0 0 1 1], ...
    'FlowDirection','topdown','Background',get(pnh,'Background'));
end

but I wish for a more robust solution. I thought of combining two UDD classes (via inheritance or any other method), but I am not quite sure how to do it. Can you help?

Kind regards,
Yaroslav

@Yaroslav – take a look at my ^[21] and how it adds properties to existing UDD handles via the ^[22] function.

Note that unfortunately this feature is no longer available in the ^[23].

For more information on UDD inheritance, ^[24].

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?

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.

[…] exact, MATLAB has some undocumented plans managers: uiflowcontainer and uigridcontainer. See this article by Yair […]

[…] while researching UI layout techniques for programmatic GUI creation one of their articles made mention of this uiflowcontainer, which if you get the documentation on it you find it is undocumented. […]

Is there a way to specify a minimum height or width of uigridcontainer?

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')

Hi Yair,

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).

@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…).

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 : )