Today I will expand last week’s post ^[1] on customizing Matlab Desktop’s shortcuts. I will show that we can incorporate non-standard controls, and add tooltips and user callbacks in undocumented ways that are not available using the interactive Desktop GUI.

Displaying the Shortcuts panel

Before we begin to modify shortcuts in the Toolstrip’s shortcuts menu, we need to ensure that the Shortcuts panel is visible and active (in current focus), otherwise our customizations will be ignored or cause an error. There is probably a more direct way of doing this, but a simple way that I found was to edit the current Desktop’s layout to include a directive to display the Shortcuts tab, and then load that layout:

jDesktop = com.mathworks.mde.desk.MLDesktop.getInstance;
hMainFrame = com.mathworks.mde.desk.MLDesktop.getInstance.getMainFrame;
jToolstrip = hMainFrame.getToolstrip;
isOk = jToolstrip.setCurrentTab('shortcuts');
if ~isOk  % i.e., Shortcuts tab is NOT displayed
    % Save the current Desktop layout
    jDesktop.saveLayout('Yair');  pause(0.15);
    % Update the layout file to display the Shortcuts tab
    filename = fullfile(prefdir, 'YairMATLABLayout.xml');
    fid = fopen(filename, 'rt');
    txt = fread(fid, '*char')';
    fclose(fid);
    txt = regexprep(txt,'(ShowShortcutsTab=)"[^"]*"','');
    txt = regexprep(txt,'(]*)>','$1 ShowShortcutsTab="yes">');
    fid = fopen(filename, 'wt');
    fwrite(fid,txt);
    fclose(fid);
    % Load the modified layout
    jDesktop.restoreLayout('Yair');  pause(0.15);
    % The shortcuts tab should now be visible, so transfer focus to that tab
    jToolstrip.setCurrentTab('shortcuts');
end

Custom controls

As I explained in last week’s post ^[2], we can use scUtils.addShortcutToBottom to add a simple push-button shortcut to the relevant category panel within the Shortcuts toolstrip tab. To add custom controls, we can simply add the controls to the relevant shortcut category panel container (a com.mathworks.toolstrip.components.TSPanel object). The standard shortcuts are typically placed in the Shortcuts tab’s second TSPanel (“general”), and other categories have TSPanels of their own.
Now here’s the tricky part about TSPanels: we cannot directly add components to the sectino panel (that would be too easy…): the section panels are composed of an array of internal TSPanels, and we need to add the new controls to those internal panels. However, these panels only contain 3 empty slots. If we try to add more than 3 components, the 4th+ component(s) will simply not be displayed. In such cases, we need to create a new TSPanel to display the extra components.
Here then is some sample code to add a combo-box (drop-down) control:

% First, get the last internal TSPanel within the Shortcuts tab's "general" section panel
% Note: jToolstrip was defined in the previous section above
jShortcutsTab = jToolstrip.getModel.get('shortcuts').getComponent;
jSectionPanel = jShortcutsTab.getSectionComponent(1).getSection.getComponent;  % the TSPanel object "general"
jContainer = jSectionPanel.getComponent(jSectionPanel.getComponentCount-1);
% If the last internal TSPanel is full, then prepare a new internal TSPanel next to it
if jContainer.getComponentCount >= 3
    % Create a new empty TSPanel and add it to the right of the last internal TSPanel
    jContainer = com.mathworks.toolstrip.components.TSPanel;
    jContainer.setPreferredSize(java.awt.Dimension(100,72));
    jSectionPanel.add(jContainer);
    jSectionPanel.repaint();
    jSectionPanel.revalidate();
end
% Create the new control with a custom tooltip and callback function
optionStrings = {'Project A', 'Project B', 'Project C'};
jCombo = com.mathworks.toolstrip.components.TSComboBox(optionStrings);
jCombo = handle(javaObjectEDT(jCombo), 'callbackproperties'));
set(jCombo, 'ActionPerformedCallback', @myCallbackFunction);
jCombo.setToolTipText('Select the requested project');
% Now add the new control to the internal TSPanel
jContainer.add(jCombo);
jContainer.repaint();
jContainer.revalidate();

dataModel = javax.swing.SpinnerNumberModel(125, 15, 225, 0.5);  % defaultValue, minValue, maxValue, stepSize
jSpinner = com.mathworks.toolstrip.components.TSSpinner(dataModel);
jSpinner = handle(javaObjectEDT(jSpinner), 'CallbackProperties');
[hjSpinner, hContainer] = javacomponent(jSpinner, [10,10,60,20], gcf);

You can find additional interesting components within the %matlabroot%/java/jar/toolstrip.jar file, which can be opened in any zip file utility or Java IDE. In fact, whatever controls that you see Matlab uses in its Desktop toolstrip (including galleries etc.) can be replicated in custom tabs, sections and panels of our own design.
Matlab Desktop’s interactive GUI only enables creating simple push-button shortcuts having string callbacks (that are eval‘ed in run-time). Using the undocumented programmatic interface that I just showed, we can include more sophisticated controls, as well as customize those controls in ways that are impossible via the programmatic GUI: add tooltips, set non-string (function-handle) callbacks, enable/disable controls, modify icons in run-time etc.
For example (intentionally showing two separate ways of setting the component properties):

% Toggle-button
jTB = handle(javaObjectEDT(com.mathworks.toolstrip.components.TSToggleButton('Toggle button')), 'CallbackProperties')
jTB.setSelected(true)
jTB.setToolTipText('toggle me!')
jTB.ActionPerformedCallback = @(h,e)doSomething();
jContainer.add(jTB);
% Check-box
jCB = handle(javaObjectEDT(com.mathworks.toolstrip.components.TSCheckBox('selected !')), 'CallbackProperties');
set(jCB, 'Selected', true, 'ToolTipText','Please select me!', 'ActionPerformedCallback',{@myCallbackFunction,extraData});
jContainer.add(jCB);

(resulting in the screenshot at the top of this post)
Important note: none of these customizations is saved to file. Therefore, they need to be redone programmatically for each separate Matlab session. You can easily do that by calling the relevant code in your startup.m file.
If you wish me to assist with any customization of the Desktop shortcuts, or any other Matlab aspect, then contact me ^[6] for a short consultancy.
Happy New Year everybody!

6 Comments To "Programmatic shortcuts manipulation – part 2"

#1 Comment By Mola On January 11, 2016 @ 20:08

hMainFrame = com.mathworks.mde.desk.MLDesktop.getInstance.getMainFrame;
jToolstrip = hMainFrame.getToolstrip;
jHomeTab = jToolstrip.getModel.get('home').getComponent;
jMySection = com.mathworks.toolstrip.sections.FlowToolstripSection('MySection');
jHomeTab.add(jMySection);  % error
jHomeTab.repaint();
jHomeTab.revalidate();

#2 Comment By Ale On January 28, 2016 @ 19:23

#3 Comment By Matt On November 7, 2020 @ 17:48

#4 Comment By Alex On April 20, 2016 @ 15:40

#5 Comment By Harald On May 9, 2016 @ 18:12

#6 Comment By xuejie wu On April 15, 2022 @ 11:24