Customizing figure toolbar background

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

In one of my projects, I needed to present a radar (polar) plot. Such plots are usually drawn on a black background and I wanted all the plot controls to blend into this background.

Matlab figure having black toolbar background

Matlab figure having black toolbar background

For the plot itself I used a variation of Matlab’s buggy polar function, which I modified to enable proper dynamic resize / zoom / pan, bypass figure-renderer issues with patches and data-cursors, and other similar annoyances. Pretty standard stuff.

For the slider I’ve used a javax.swing.JSlider having a continuous-movement callback. Again, for readers of this blog this is nothing special:

[jSlider,hSlider] = javacomponent('javax.swing.JSlider',[0,0,.01,0.1],hFig);
set(hSlider, 'Units','norm','pos',[.15,0,.7,.05]);
set(jSlider, 'Background',java.awt.Color.black, ...
             'Value',0, 'Maximum',duration, ...
             'StateChangedCallback',{@cbSlider,hFig,axPlayback});

Setting the background color for all the GUI components to black was easy. But setting the toolbar’s background to black turned out to be a bit more interesting, and is the topic of this week’s article.

Standard Matlab figure toolbar - yuck!

Standard Matlab figure toolbar - yuck!

The first step, naturally, is to get the toolbar’s handle:

hToolbar = findall(hFig,'tag','FigureToolBar');

In my case, I programmatically create the figure and use the default figure toolbar, whose tag value is always ‘FigureToolBar’. If I had used a custom toolbar, I would naturally use the corresponding tag (for example, if you create a custom toolbar using GUIDE, then the tag name will probably be ‘toolbar1’ or something similar).

Since I’m setting the figure programmatically, I need to manually remove several unuseful toolbar controls. I do this by directly accessing the toolbar control handles:

delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Plottools.PlottoolsOn'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Plottools.PlottoolsOff'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Annotation.InsertColorbar'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','DataManager.Linking'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Standard.EditPlot'))

For setting the bgcolor, we get the toolbar’s underlying Java component, then sprinkle some Java magic power:

% ensure the toolbar is visible onscreen
drawnow;
 
% Get the underlying JToolBar component
jToolbar = get(get(hToolbar,'JavaContainer'),'ComponentPeer');
 
% Set the bgcolor to black
color = java.awt.Color.black;
jToolbar.setBackground(color);
jToolbar.getParent.getParent.setBackground(color);
 
% Remove the toolbar border, to blend into figure contents
jToolbar.setBorderPainted(false);
 
% Remove the separator line between toolbar and contents
jFrame = get(handle(hFig),'JavaFrame');
jFrame.showTopSeparator(false);

Unfortunately, this is not enough. The reason is that some of Matlab’s standard toolbar icons use non-opaque Java button controls (thereby showing the new black bgcolor), whereas other icons use opaque buttons, with a hard-coded gray background (I feel like spanking someone…). I’ve already touched upon this issue briefly a few years ago.

Matlab figure toolbar with black background, some opaque buttons

Matlab figure toolbar with black background, some opaque buttons

Luckily, all is not lost: we simply need to loop over all the JToolBar’s components and force them to be non-opaque with a black bgcolor. In cases where the component is compound (e.g., the Brush Data uisplittool), we need to set the bgcolor for all the sub-components:

jtbc = jToolbar.getComponents;
for idx=1:length(jtbc)
    jtbc(idx).setOpaque(false);
    jtbc(idx).setBackground(color);
    for childIdx = 1 : length(jtbc(idx).getComponents)
        jtbc(idx).getComponent(childIdx-1).setBackground(color);
    end
end

…finally ending up with the blended appearance that appears at the top of this article.

Related posts:

  1. Toolbar button labels – GUI toolbar button labels can easily be set and customized using underlying Java components. ...
  2. Blurred Matlab figure window – Matlab figure windows can be blurred using a semi-transparent overlaid window - this article explains how...
  3. Minimize/maximize figure window – Matlab figure windows can easily be maximized, minimized and restored using a bit of undocumented magic powder...
  4. Builtin PopupPanel widget – We can use a built-in Matlab popup-panel widget control to display lightweight popups that are attached to a figure window. ...
  5. Matlab toolstrip – part 9 (popup figures) – Custom popup figures can be attached to Matlab GUI toolstrip controls. ...
  6. Using pure Java GUI in deployed Matlab apps – Using pure-Java GUI in deployed Matlab apps requires a special yet simple adaptation. ...
Categories: Figure window, GUI, Java, Medium risk of breaking in future versions, Undocumented feature

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6 Responses to Customizing figure toolbar background

  1. Zheng Liu says:
    March 12, 2013 at 6:41 am

    Hi Yair:

    Thank you for your contribution, it is an excellent work, if my figure is a GUI (created by GUIDE), how should I change my customized Toolbar’s backgroundcolor? suppose my Toolbar’s Tag is uitoolbar1, thank you very much.

    Reply
    • Yair Altman says:
      March 12, 2013 at 2:34 pm

      @Zheng – follow the steps outlined in the article, simply modify

      hToolbar = findall(hFig,'tag','FigureToolBar');

      to:

      hToolbar = findall(handles.hObject,'tag','uitoolbar1');

      in your *_OutputFcn() function that is generated by GUIDE.

      The rest of the code in my article should follow this line (use handles.hObject wherever it says hFig in my article).

    • Zheng Liu says:
      March 15, 2013 at 8:13 am

      Dear Yair, thank you very much for your timely reply, your suggestion gave me a very critical help, wish you good luck.

  2. Zheng Liu says:
    March 15, 2013 at 6:57 pm

    Dear Yair:

    I put the two techniques (http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/figure-toolbar-customizations/ and http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-figure-toolbar-background/) designed by you together, I hope to change the background while floating the toolbar, this effect has been achieved in function, but there are a few small issues to be resolved, the questions are as follows:
    (1) How should I do to specify the location of the toolbar while floating? unfortunately, my way (jTbar.getUI.setFloating(true,java.awt.Point(0,0));) does not work;
    (2) How should I do to control the emergence and disappear of the toolbar via right-click menu(for example attached to the current GUI figure)? I currently take a drag-and-off style.

    Yours Sincerely.

    My code (in the “*_OutputFcn()” that is generated by GUIDE) is as follows:

    % --- Outputs from this function are returned to the command line.
function varargout = toolbar_demo_OutputFcn(hObject, eventdata, handles) 
% varargout  cell array for returning output args (see VARARGOUT);
% hObject    handle to figure
% eventdata  reserved - to be defined in a future version of MATLAB
% handles    structure with handles and user data (see GUIDATA)
 
% Get default command line output from handles structure
varargout{1} = handles.output;
jTbar = get(get(findall(handles.figure_main,'tag','uitoolbar1'),'JavaContainer'),'ComponentPeer');
color = java.awt.Color.red;
jTbar.setBackground(color);
jTbar.getParent.getParent.setBackground(color);
jtbc = jTbar.getComponents;
for idx=1:length(jtbc)
    jtbc(idx).setOpaque(false);
    jtbc(idx).setBackground(color);
    for childIdx = 1 : length(jtbc(idx).getComponents)
        jtbc(idx).getComponent(childIdx-1).setBackground(color);
    end
end
jTbar.setBorderPainted(false);
jFrame = get(handle(handles.figure_main),'JavaFrame');
jFrame.showTopSeparator(false);
jTbCon = jTbar.getParent;
jLayout = java.awt.FlowLayout(0,0,0);
jTbar.setLayout(jLayout);
jTbar.setFloatable(true);
jTbar.getUI.setFloating(true,java.awt.Point(0,0));
jCpts = jTbar.getComponents;
for i = 1 : length(jCpts)
    jMls = jCpts(i).getMouseListeners;
    for j = 1 : length(jMls)
        if ~isempty(strfind(get(jMls(j),'type'),'FlyOverListener'))
            jCpts(i).removeMouseListener(jMls(j))
            jCls = jCpts(i).getChangeListeners;
            if ~isempty(strfind(get(jCls(1),'type'),'FlyOverListener'))
                jCpts(i).removeChangeListener(jCls(1))
            end
        end
    end
end
hjTbar = handle(jTbar,'CallbackProperties');
dockUndockCallbackFcn(hjTbar,1,jTbCon)
set(hjTbar,'AncestorAddedCallback',{@dockUndockCallbackFcn,jTbCon});
 
function dockUndockCallbackFcn(src, ~, jTbc)
if src.isFloating
    jWin = src.getTopLevelAncestor;
    jWin.setResizable(true)
    jWin.setPreferredSize(java.awt.Dimension(450,57));
    jWin.setSize(java.awt.Dimension(450,57));
    jTbc.setVisible(false)
    set(jWin,'WindowClosingCallback',@(~,~)jTbc.setVisible(true))
end
    Reply
  3. masi says:
    October 17, 2016 at 8:54 pm

    Which polar coordinate system did you use for your solution in MATLAB 2013?

    I am trying to integrate your code to MATLAB 2016b `polaraxes` + `warp` in the thread here http://stackoverflow.com/q/40086038/54964

    Reply

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