Creating Graphical User Interfaces

Defining Menus for the Menu Bar

When you create a drop-down menu, MATLAB adds its title to the figure menu bar. You can then create menu items for that menu. Each menu item can have a cascading menu, also known as a submenu, and these items can have cascading menus, and so on.

Creating a Menu

The first step is to click the New Menu tool to create a drop-down menu.

Specifying Menu Properties

Click on the menu title, Untitled 1 in the picture above, to display fields that allow you to set the Label, Tag, Accelerator, Separator, Checked, and Enable menu properties as well as specify the Callback string. GUIDE applies any property changes immediately. Click More options to display the Property Inspector where you can edit all the properties for the selected item.

The View button displays the callback subfunction in an editor. See Menu Callbacks for more information.

Adding Items to a Menu

Use the New Menu Item tool to define the menu items that are displayed in the drop-down menu.

For example, to add an Open menu item under File, select File then click the New Menu Item tool.

Fill in the Label and Tag fields for the new menu item.

You can also

• Choose a keyboard accelerator for the menu item with the Accelerator pop-up menu.
• Select the Separator above this item check box to display a separator above the menu item.
• Select the Check mark this item check box to display a check next to the menu item when the menu is first opened. A check indicates the current state of the menu item. See the example in Adding Items to the Context Menu.
• Select the Enable this item check box so that the user can select this item when the menu is first opened. If you deselect this option, the menu item appears dimmed when the menu is first opened, and the user cannot select it.
• Click the More options button to open the Property Inspector where you can change all uimenu properties.

To create additional drop-down menus, use the New Menu tool in the same way you did to create the File menu. For example, the following picture also shows an Edit drop-down menu.

To create a cascading menu, select the menu item that will be the title for the cascading menu, then click the New Menu Item tool. In the example below, select Copy then click the New Menu Item tool.

Laying Out Three Menus

The following Menu Editor illustration shows three menus defined for the figure menu bar.

When you run the GUI, the menu titles appear in the menu bar.

Creating Menus -- The Menu Editor

Menu Callbacks

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