I am struggling for a while with an efficient retrieving of dynamic changing substructures from a string. According to my measurements, classical for loop combined with regexp is the fastest one. However, regexp seems to be a big bottleneck in this case.

string1 = 'one.two.three.four';
A.one.two.three.four = 1;

tic
for n = 1:1000
   eval(['out1 = A.', string1, ';']);
end
toc

tic
for n = 1:1000
   out2 = eval(['A.', string1]);
end
toc

tic
for n = 1:1000
   reg1 = regexp(string1, '\.', 'split');
   out3 = getfield(A, reg1{:});
end
toc

tic
for n = 1:1000
   reg2 = regexp(string1, '\.', 'split');
   out4 = A.(reg2{1});
   for n = 2:length(reg1)
      out4 = out4.(reg2{n});
   end
end
toc

With times:
Elapsed time is 0.036253 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.031294 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.046321 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.018785 seconds.

so getfield is the slowest option here and classical “sub-looping” the fastest.

Nevertheless, a faster replacement for regexp (since I am running version without strsplit) would be definitely nice.

Andrea, could you find a solution for this. It happens in my application also when we have changed to 2015b

props = struct;
props.Info_A.Field_1 = {'A' 'B' 'C' ''};
props.Info_B.Field_2 = {'1' '2' '3' ''};
props.Info_B.Field_3 = {'X' 'Y' 'Z'};
props.Info_C.Field_1 = '';
propertiesGUI(figure, props);

The result: the first row, which should be an editable dropdown with choice ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’ is now just a text box, and there’s no dropdown.

Also, some questions regarding using dates: is there a way to set a date property to empty? I’d like the box to be empty until the user fills it in the first time. Secondly, when you fill the date box you get something like “Aug 19, 2015”, but when the date selector is opened the format is dd/MM/yyyy. (I figured out how to make it yyyy-MM-dd for my own use). How do I switch the “Aug 19, 2015” view to “2015-08-19”? I’m using MATLAB R2014b.

Thanks a lot! This is an overall excellent function to use.

@MI – I will be very happy to help you integrate sophisticated table controls in your Matlab GUI, for a consulting fee. Please contact me via email (altmany at gmail).

very good work! keep it up!

Actually I find it very useful to have a CellEditor for numeric matrix or for mixed-type table-data (cell-array).
Therefor I would like to use your app “Java-based data table” (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/14225-java-based-data-table), that is very useful for table-data!

But how can I link this Table-GUI-widget to the propertiesGUI? As I have read, we have to create a custom CellEditor that inherits from a JIDE CellEditor?
Can you give me some information how to start with that?

Or are there any built-in CellEditors that can do this?

Dear Yair,
I can confirm that this problem holds. Tested in R2012b & R2014a. The error message arises from calling propertiesGUI with no arguments (in “demo mode”). If I supply a MATLAB structure as an argument, it seems to work fine.

@Rainer – it’s good to hear from you again and thanks for the update!

Problems arose after upgrading to 2014a and from talking to the tech support,

set(hProp,'UserData',propName)

is problematic. According to them, “…..The ‘UserData‘ property has been removed from the ‘DefaultProperty’ Java class in R2014a and this is an undocumented internal MATLAB component. One way to work around this would be to use a property which is defined for both versions of MATLAB like ‘Description‘. You could use the SET and GET functions to set and query values….”

Ah, okay. I was not aware of that as I work on 2012b. This explains a lot!