Any updates on this development? I just raised a similar question there: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1571813-custom-class-properties-and-method-attributes?s_tid=mlc_ans_email_view#comment_1801123 and after searching for “Description attribute” I ended up here 😀

Maarten,

No, you can’t do that, although MathWorks are considering the possibility for a future enhancement. A similar question was asked on StackOverflow a while ago (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26710767/which-methods-keywords-i-e-testmethodsetup-can-occur-in-matlab/26733613#26733613) and received a couple of answers, one of which was from Andy Campbell, a senior developer at MathWorks. See the comment thread under his answer.

In the meantime, it is sometimes possible to achieve your aims by abusing the undocumented attributes Description and DetailedDescription.
These are undocumented, but are always present (on class, method, property and event elements), and accept a string value that you can use to store essentially whatever you want. Some built-in classes such as containers.Map use them to store a description of the class.

Because they are undocumented, if you use them they will cause a red underline in the MATLAB editor (without any actual runtime error). You can suppress this using %#ok<ATUNK> at the end of the line.

>> mTestClass = meta.class.fromName('matlab.unittest.TestCase');
>> mTestMethod = mClass.MethodList(1)
mTestMethod = 
  method with properties:
                    Test: 0
         TestMethodSetup: 0
      TestMethodTeardown: 0
          TestClassSetup: 0
       TestClassTeardown: 0
    ParameterCombination: ''
                TestTags: {}
                    Name: 'TestCase'
             Description: ''
     DetailedDescription: ''
                     ...

The top 7 properties correspond to the method attributes that are available in the method definition blocks, for classes derived from matlab.unittest.TestCase. Apparently these have been added by subclassing the meta.method object to the new matlab.unittest.meta.method, which is indeed the meta class that is returned for classes derived from the superclass matlab.unittest.TestCase.

My question is: do you know of any (undocumented) means to define such attributes ourselves, such that you could do something like this?

classdef MyClass < MyBaseClass
    methods (CustomAttribute = "Custom attribute value")
       ...
    end
end

Any insight or directions would be highly appreciated!

>> help classname

echoes the comments under the classdef line and

>> help classname.classname

echoes the comments under the function constructor. When Description is specified

Ok that makes sense, and explains the clumsy behavior below.

>> foo(3) = scatteredInterpolant
foo = 
  1x3 scatteredInterpolant array with properties:

    Points
    Values
    Method
    ExtrapolationMethod

>> foo(3)
ans =
     []

I see what you mean, but I don’t think it is related. scatteredInterpolant simply overloaded the subsref(), subsasgn(), end() methods for this functionality. You can do it in any user class.

@Yair – Sorry, I wasn’t clear. Each instance of scatteredInterpolant is a function.

foo = scatteredInterpolant (x, y, z); 
c = foo (a, b);

I don’t think their is a documented way to produce a class (via classdef) that supports the feature, c=foo(a,b). From the name of the attribute SupportClassFunctions I inferred this may needed to allow foo to be used as a function.

@Ben – I don’t think I follow you – scatteredInterpolant is a simple Matlab class, not a function (see here).

@Chris – take a look at the Doxygen for Matlab utility on the File Exchange – no need to reinvent the wheel…