Thanks!
Again a precious tool. I’m going to use it immediately

Dear Yair,
as soon as I try to deploy a stand-alone application including propertiesGUI.m
a message box appears with “unauthorized use of JIDE products” and consequetly “please contact ^[15]“.
The same messagebox is displayed in the deployed application.

Am I doing something wrong? Or, which package from JIDE would you suggest.

Many thanks,
Andrea

@Andrea – try calling com.mathworks.mwswing.MJUtilities.initJIDE before your call to propertiesGUI. I think this should be enough – let us know.

Dear Yair,

I added the line you suggested, but it still provides the same message when compiling using my licensed R2008 version, the one I use to deploy applications. It appears also when compiling propertiesGUI.m alone

Message is here: ^[16]

No problems when compiling with R2011a.

Thanks again!
Andrea

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

So it seems hgjavacomponents aren’t the original instantiation, otherwise I’d be able to (with my button) add another Property to the the Properties array in the PropertyTableModel object and see the Pane update automatically… is that right?

(This is still great though)

N

@Nick – after you update the PropertyTableModel you need to refresh the actual data table. grid.update() should do the trick. To get the reference to grid in external code, simply modify line #1 of propertiesGUI.m to also return the grid variable.

[…] names and values, which is the reason it is used by Matlab’s inspect function and my generic propertiesGUI utility or Levente Hunyadi’s Property Grid utility. But in this case we wish to display a general […]

I saw that you used eval in order to simplify the assignment of multiple sub-fields (like ‘dimension.width’) because data.(‘dimension.width’) fails. I took a crack at a minimalist recursive struct assignment function and this is what I came up with:

function s = multiStruct(field,s)
% Function to recursively generate a struct from a string of field names
%
% field = 'life.universe.everything'
% value = 42
% answer = multiStruct(field,value)
%
% Same as answer.life.universe.everything = 42

    index=[0,strfind(field,'.')];    
    if ~isempty(field)
        s = multiStruct(field(1:index(end)-1), struct(field(index(end)+1:end),s));
    end
end

Looked at doing it with inline anonymous functions and it’s just messier than it’s worth in my opinion.

Or you could use the standard MATLAB function setfield, which is presumably more efficient. Assuming answer already exists and is a scalar struct and all of the nested structs are scalar, too, this would simply be

 
answer = setfield(answer, 'life', 'universe', 'everything', 42);

or if your field names are contained in a cell-array named fields

 
fields = {'life', 'universe', 'everything'};
answer = setfield(answer, fields{:}, 42);

or if you insist on using a single string with fields delimited by periods

 
fields = 'life.universe.everything';
fields = strsplit(fields, '.'); % only R2013a or higher, but more elegant
%fields = regexp(fields, '\.', 'split'); % portable, but a bit ugly
answer = setfield(answer, fields{:}, 42);

which could of course be wrapped in a separate function for convenience. The documentation of the setfield function (which can do even more) is a bit confusing on first sight, so maybe it is not instantly obvious that it can be used to create a nested struct. Equally, getfield provides easy access to values of nested structs.

@Martin – nice touch!

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.

How to create a text dynamic under GUI/MATLAB
Thanks again

@DJamel – you need to be much clearer in your question

Hello

Do you have an idea how to display the results of the command
window on the GUI front in a scrolling fashion?

OR

Does a “dynamic text” box exists that allows for updates (i.e. a
returned value to be displayed to the GUI front)?
Thanks again

I’m not sure I understand how this relates to propertiesGUI…

Hi Yair
do you know a way to set a file filter when using a file type with com.jidesoft.grid.FileCellEditor?
I would like for example to browse only for ‘*.exe’ files.
Same for dialog title.

I could find a solution for the File filter:

editor = com.jidesoft.grid.FileCellEditor;      %('Select an .exe file','exe')
ComboBox = editor.getComboBox;
jfilefilter = javaObjectEDT('javax.swing.filechooser.FileNameExtensionFilter','Exe-Files (*.exe)','exe');
ComboBox.setFileFilter(jfilefilter);

I run into an error, trying the demo of the current version on R2013b:

>> propertiesGUI
No method 'setValue' with matching signature found for class
'com.jidesoft.grid.DefaultProperty'.
Error in propertiesGUI>newProperty (line 482)
      prop.setValue(thisProp);
Error in propertiesGUI>preparePropsList (line 421)
              newProp = newProperty(parameters, field_name, field_label, isEditable,
              type, field_description, @propUpdatedCallback);
Error in propertiesGUI (line 154)
  propsList = preparePropsList(parameters, isEditable); 

If I uncomment line 482, I run into this problem:

>> propertiesGUI
No constructor 'javax.swing.SpinnerNumberModel' with matching signature found.
Error in propertiesGUI>newProperty (line 503)
                            model = javax.swing.SpinnerNumberModel(prop.getValue,
                            -intmax, intmax, 1);
Error in propertiesGUI>preparePropsList (line 421)
              newProp = newProperty(parameters, field_name, field_label, isEditable,
              type, field_description, @propUpdatedCallback);
Error in propertiesGUI (line 154)
  propsList = preparePropsList(parameters, isEditable); 

any idea?

@Kai – I assume that you are running Matlab without Java (probably some limited console mode or something like that). propertiesGUI uses Java components and so cannot possibly run in such circumstances.

Hi Yair,

This was not the problem.
The error was the class_object_property example: matlab.desktop.editor.getActive.
In my case it was a “1×0 Document array with properties…”.
The editor must be open for it to work.

@Kai – are you sure that you’re using the latest propertiesGUI version (24 Dec 2013)? I believe it was already solved long ago, maybe you are using an old version…

Yes, that’s the version:
% $Revision: 1.09 $ $Date: 2013/12/24 14:33:21 $

And matlab:
MATLAB Version: 8.2.0.701 (R2013b)

then this is odd because as you can see in the code, the matlab.desktop.editor.* calls are placed within try-catch blocks. Perhaps you mis-diagnosed the problem?

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.

Hi Yair,

this is a very useful submission. But wouldn’t it be better if this was written in OOP, so one could easily overload a function (e.g. a callback)?

If I got this right, I would have to make a copy of the function for every (different) purpose.

Actually, it should be not a big thing to turn it into an object, right?

Best wishes,
Jan

@Jan – when I provide public utilities that are expected to work on old Matlab releases, before Matlab classes in their new format were introduced in R2008a, I have no option but to use standard procedural programming. This does not reflect bad programming practices or the inability to adapt to modern times, just a conscious decision to support multiple Matlab versions. I wish that other programmers were as conscious of backward compatibility as I try to be.

Feel free to adapt the code as you see fit, if you only use a new Matlab release and none of your users use an old release.

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

Hi Yair, nice to see CHAMP being used as an example here 🙂

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….”

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

Hi Yair,

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” ( ^[17]), 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?

@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).

I think I found a bug in propertiesGUI. If you have multiple field names that exist in different structs, all of those property fields are set to the same type as the last field. Here’s an example:

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.

Hi
I want to thank from Mr Yair Altman due to its comments in GUI area. I have a question:
Is is possible to call Tow other GUI in a main GUI in the main window without opening a new window ?
My means is that i want to merge some different GUI in a main GUI with one window.
B. Regards