For what I’ve perused in my coding, there are also:

– timer callbacks
– instrument callbacks
– Observable property class callbacks

To my understanding, from the user point of view, graphical callbacks are the only ones which can be declared, using matlab language alone, as interruptible (or non-). The fact that a callback function is or not interruptible has far reaching consequences, for the use I have been making of them.

Moreover, imho, “callbacks” associated to Pre/Post set/get listeners of properties of ordinary classes, are not even “callbacks”, in the sense that there is no external, asynchronous event which fires them; they are more like a syntactic sugar, for function calls which are inserted by the compiler whenever property assignments are encountered in the program flow. Not surprisingly to me, they in fact the only ones that turn to be “interruptible”.

As a part of a large codebase in a big [project, I have documented my conclusions in
https://github.com/EastEriq/LAST_Messaging/blob/gledmagicwater/doc/Exploiting_Callbacks.md
I wonder if you have the time to skim through it and to add your insight….

BTW, thanks , your suggestion worked..!

@Rohit – yes you can, but I have no idea why you’d want to do this. After all, text controls are typically changed programmatically (not interactively) so you can call your requested functionality whenever you modify the text.

In any case, here’s how you can attach the requested callback:

hText = uicontrol('Style','text', ...);
hProp = findprop(hText,'String');
callback = @(h,e) disp(hText.String);  % your callback function handle
hListener = addlistener(hText, hProp, 'PostSet', callback);

Can we attach a listener to “text” uicontrol ? So that whenever “String” property of “text” control changes, we can detect it ?

@Ofer – you need to set the GetObservable meta-attribute to enable listening to PreGet/PostGet events, and similarly set SetObservable for PreSet/PostSet events. For example:

hObj = gcf;  % current figure (can be any handle)
hProp = addprop(hObj,'Yair');
hProp.SetObservable = true;
addlistener(hObj,'Yair','PostSet',@(h,e)disp(123));
hObj.Yair = 2;  % "123" will be displayed in the Matlab console

If you forget to set the GetObservable/SetObservable meta-attribute, you will receive a run-time error when you try to call addlistener:

Error using matlab.ui.Figure/addlistener
While adding a PostSet listener, property 'Yair' in class 'matlab.ui.Figure' is not defined to be SetObservable. 

Specificaly, I would like to listen to the value property of a jFormattedTextField as suggested by the javadocs

Hi John,

you can listen to a ‘SizeChanged’ Property in HG2 handling

h = addlistener(gcf,'SizeChanged',@func);

@John – Not the most elegant solution – but you could try to listen for an Event that always executes when position is changed. Using Matlab 2015a; for example, to determine potential event names for an axes position change:

 
hAxes = axes;
md = ?matlab.graphics.axis.Axes;
eventNames = {md.EventList.Name};
for iEvent = 1:numel(eventNames)
    addlistener(hAxes, eventNames{iEvent}, @(~,~) disp(eventNames{iEvent}));
end

And then change your axes position in various manners to see what Events occur. My very-quick testing indicates Events {‘MarkedDirty’, ‘LocationChanged’, ‘SizeChanged’, ‘MarkedClean’} are called in that order.

Keep in mind some Events {‘MarkedDirty’, ‘MarkedClean’} are called for all sorts of (non-position related) reasons.

@John – I do not know of a way to listen to non-observable properties. Perhaps there is a way, but I don’t know it.