Creating Graphical User Interfaces (GUIDE) Features

MATLAB Release Notes

Creating Graphical User Interfaces (GUIDE) Features

If you are using the Help browser, view the Creating Graphical User Interfaces new features video demo to see highlights of the major new features.

MATLAB 7.0 adds the following new features and enhancements for creating graphical user interfaces.

New Container Components

MATLAB 7.0 introduces two new container components,

Panel -- Groups components
Button group - Groups components and manages exclusive selection behavior for radio buttons and toggle buttons.

These components are available in the GUIDE Layout Editor and via the functions uipanel and uibuttongroup.

A container component can be the child of a figure or another container. In general, containers can have as children the same components as figures, including other containers. However, they cannot have menu bars, toolbars, or ActiveX controls as children. The Position property of the child of a panel or button group is interpreted relative to the panel or button group. If you move the panel or button group, the components it contains automatically move with it and maintain their positions.

Panel properties and button group properties enable you to control the color, size, border, and position of the panel or button group, assign a title, and specify a context menu. In general, panels and button groups have many of the same properties as uicontrol objects.

Working with Container Components in GUIDE

For information about working with panels and button groups in GUIDE, see the following topics in the Creating Graphical User Interfaces collection of the MATLAB documentation.

ActiveX Controls

GUIDE now enables you to insert an ActiveX control into your GUI if you are running MATLAB on Microsoft Windows. When you drag an ActiveX component from the component palette into the layout area, GUIDE displays a dialog in which you can select any registered ActiveX control on your system. When you select an ActiveX control and click Create, the control appears as a small box in the Layout Editor. You can then program the control to do what you want it to.

See MATLAB COM Client Support in the online MATLAB documentation and ActiveX Controls in the GUIDE documentation to learn more about ActiveX controls.

New Toolbar Component

A new function, uitoolbar, enables you to add a toolbar to a figure. You can add your own pushtools and toggletools to the toolbar with the uipushtool and uitoggletool functions.

Uipushtool properties enable you to provide a callback that responds to a mouse click. Uitoggletool properties enable you to provide callbacks that respond to the tool being set on, off, or toggled to either position. Properties for both uipushtools and uitoggletools provide for tooltip strings, separators, and truecolor images to display on the tools. In general, uitoolbar, uipushtool, and uitoggletool objects have many of the same properties as uicontrol objects.

Menu Editor Enhancements

The GUIDE Menu Editor now enables you to:

Choose a keyboard accelerator for a menu item from a pop-up menu.
Set an item's Enabled property on or off when the menu is first opened. If the property value is off, the item appears dimmed and the user cannot select it.
Open the Property Inspector where you can change all uimenu properties.
Display the callback subfunction in an editor. If the callback does not yet exist, GUIDE creates it before displaying it.

The Menu Editor is now better synchronized with other GUIDE tools:

Property changes made in the Menu Editor or in the Property Inspector are immediately reflected in the other.
uimenu objects in the Menu Editor now also appear in the Object Browser. If you select a uimenu object in either, it is automatically selected in the other.
If a component is selected in the Layout Editor and you select a menu item in the Menu Editor, the component is deselected in the Layout Editor.

See Menu Editor in the MATLAB documentation for more information.

Layout Resize Behavior

In the GUIDE Layout Editor, components you have placed in the layout area now maintain their visual position relative to the upper left corner of their parent container (figure, panel, or button group) when you resize the container. However, the values of the Position property are determined relative to the lower left corner, and these values will change accordingly when you increase or decrease the height of the container.

Key Press Detection

A new uicontrol callback property, KeyPressFcn, specifies a key press callback function with which you can detect a key press when the callback's uicontrol object has focus. If no uicontrol has focus, the figure's key press callback function, if any, is invoked. This property is available in the uicontrol function and in GUIDE.

If you specify KeyPressFcn as an M-file, the callback routine can query the figure's CurrentCharacter property to determine what particular key was pressed and thereby limit the callback execution to specific keys. If you specify KeyPressFcn as a function handle, the callback routine can retrieve information about the key that was pressed from its event data structure argument.

As an example, you can use this property to enable a user to press Enter, rather than the space bar, after giving focus to a uicontrol push button. Use the push button's key press callback function to determine if the user pressed the Enter key. If it was the Enter key, call the push button callback.

See the Uicontrol Properties for more information.

Edit Text Box Scroll Bar

For uicontrol editable text fields, i.e. the Style property is set to 'edit', if Max-Min>1, then multiple lines are allowed. For multi-line edit boxes, a vertical scroll bar enables you to scroll the text. You can also use the arrow keys to scroll.

Setting Uicontrol Focus

The uicontrol function now enables you to transfer focus programmatically to a specified uicontrol object. The syntax uicontrol(uich) transfers focus to the uicontrol object with handle uich.

Multiple Selection in uigetfile

The uigetfile function can now create a dialog that enables the user to select and retrieve multiple files using the Shift and Ctrl keys. You can turn this capability on or off using the new 'MultiSelect' parameter. The default setting is off.

Program Suspension Time-Out

A new uiwait argument, timeout, enables you to specify the number of seconds after which program execution will resume, unless uiresume is called first or the specified figure is deleted. For example,

```
uiwait(h,5)
```

causes the suspended program to resume execution, if it has not already, after five seconds.

Standard Dialog Box Push Buttons

For standard dialog boxes with more than one uicontrol push button, you can now give focus to another button while retaining the default button. Focus is denoted by a border or a dotted border, respectively, in UNIX and Microsoft Windows. The default button has a shadow.

In such a case, if the user presses the space bar, the button with focus gets the key press and can choose to execute its own callback or the callback of the default button. If the user presses Enter, the default push button gets the key press and its callback executes. This code provides an example.

ButtonName=questdlg('What is your wish?', ...
                    'Genie Question', ...
                    'Food','Clothing','Money','Money')

External Interfaces/API Features Platform Limitations