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uicontrol side-effect: removing figure toolbar

Posted By Yair Altman On October 7, 2009 | No Comments

Earlier versions of Matlab had an undocumented side-effect in the uicontrol function, of removing the figure toolbar if the figure’s toolbar property was set to ‘auto’ (which is the default value for figures).
In order to restore the toolbar, or prevent its removal in the first place, set your figure’s toolbar property to ‘figure’. This should preferably be done immediately after creating the figure, or in its *_OpeningFcn() function if the figure was created using GUIDE:

set(hFig,'toolbar','figure');

The uicontrol issue is now documented [1] in the latest Matlab 7.9 release (R2009b), although it was undocumented for many earlier Matlab releases. Nevertheless, the current documentation, coupled with the fact that this issue was widely reported in the CSSM newsgroup and so is not really innovative, made me hesitate before posting. But I’m currently on vacation and don’t have time for a more detailed article this week (I skipped last week entirely), so I apologize to anyone who feels disappointed. I promise to compensate when I get back from vacation…
A similar issue was reported for GUIDE-created figures [2], and was reportedly solved in Matlab 7.2 (R2006a).

Related posts:

  1. Customizing figure toolbar background [3] – Setting the figure toolbar's background color can easily be done using just a tiny bit of Java magic powder. This article explains how. ...
  2. Reverting axes controls in figure toolbar [4] – In R2018b the axes controls were removed from the figure toolbar, but this can be reverted. ...
  3. Figure toolbar components [5] – Matlab's toolbars can be customized using a combination of undocumented Matlab and Java hacks. This article describes how to access existing toolbar icons and how to add non-button toolbar components....
  4. Figure toolbar customizations [6] – Matlab's toolbars can be customized using a combination of undocumented Matlab and Java hacks. This article describes how to customize the Matlab figure toolbar....
  5. Adding a search box to figure toolbar [7] – An interactive search-box can easily be added to a Matlab figure toolbar for enhanced user experience. ...
  6. Customizing the standard figure toolbar, menubar [8] – The standard figure toolbar and menubar can easily be modified to include a list of recently-used files....

Categories: Figure window, GUI, Low risk of breaking in future versions, Stock Matlab function, UI controls, Undocumented feature

Article printed from Undocumented Matlab: http://undocumentedmatlab.com

URL to article: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/uicontrol-side-effect-removing-figure-toolbar

URLs in this post:

[1] documented: http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/uicontrol.html#f52-578590

[2] reported for GUIDE-created figures: http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-19P5X/

[3] Customizing figure toolbar background : http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/customizing-figure-toolbar-background

[4] Reverting axes controls in figure toolbar : http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/reverting-axes-controls-in-figure-toolbar

[5] Figure toolbar components : http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/figure-toolbar-components

[6] Figure toolbar customizations : http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/figure-toolbar-customizations

[7] Adding a search box to figure toolbar : http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/adding-a-search-box-to-figure-toolbar

[8] Customizing the standard figure toolbar, menubar : http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/customizing-standard-figure-toolbar-menubar

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