MATLAB: How to change the tabbing order of UICONTROLS in the GUI

guiMATLABordertabtabbing

I would like to control the order in which the usage of the 'Tab' key cycles through the UICONTROL objects in my MATLAB figure.

Best Answer

This functionality has been added to MATLAB in the "Tab Order Editor". For more information about setting the tab order, please see our help documentation here,

 <http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/creating_guis/setting-tab-order.html>

You may access the same page locally by typing the following at the MATLAB prompt:

 web([docroot,'/techdoc/creating_guis/f8-998374.html'])

If you are using MATLAB 7.0.4 (R14SP2) or earlier versions, read below for possible workarounds:

There are two ways to change the tabbing order of UICONTROLs in a GUI. The first, which was introduced in MATLAB 6.5 (R13), is to use the Tab Order Editor under the Tools menu in the GUIDE window. This allows you to move items up and down in the tab order.

The second way is to reorder the list of children held in the 'Children' property of the GUI figure. The first thing to note about the tabbing order of UICONTROLs within a GUI when using this technique is that the order in which the UICONTROLS appear in the figure's child list is the reverse of the order in which they will tab. Note that the children being reordered must have the same parent, e.g., if a GUI figure contains a UIPANEL, you must reorder the children of the panel separately.

Also, the order reflected in the child list of the figure is the order in which the UICONTROLs are stacked visually. This means if two UICONTROLs are overlaid, the item higher in the child list will show up on top.

Given that the child order list determines tabbing and stacking order, the utility function UISTACK can be used to manipulate the stack.

For example, to move an item up in the stack, find the handle to that object and then move it using UISTACK:

h = findobj('Tag', TagOfObject);
uistack(h, 'up');

Using UISTACK is the preferred method of manipulating the tab order of UICONTROLs.

Another method to change the tab order of UICONTROLs is to permute the order of the handles of the children of the figure:

1. Assign the vector of Children of the GUI figure to a variable by using the following command:

HandlesOfChildren = get(HandleOfFigure,'Children');

2. Permute the HandlesOfChildren vector as you wish. For instance, to reverse the tab order:

ReversedChildren = flipud(HandlesOfChildren);

3. Reassign the permuted vector to the Children property of the figure:

set(HandleOfFigure, 'Children', ReversedChildren);

NOTE: You can only assign a vector which is a permutation of the vector of children in this manner; you can't, for example, do the following because 0 is not the handle of a child of the figure:

set(HandleOfFigure,'Children',[0 HandlesOfChildren(2:end)]);

Also note that there are also some components that cannot be tabbed. You cannot tab to axes, static text boxes, and ActiveX components.

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Make UIAxes invisible/visible when stacked in App desginer..

Update: Starting in Matlab r2020b, change the stack order of UI components in App Designer using the reorder tool (see release notes).

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Unfortunately uistack() is not functional with UIFigures (prior to r2020b). Here's a function you could embed in your app that will put an object on top of the UI stack. Add the function by opening the app in app designer, go to code view, select functions, and add the function by pressing the green "+" under the Code Browser. Then call the function any time an object needs to be moved to top. Unfortunately the app image will flicker during the restack as the objects are redrawn.

function uistackTop(~, appfig, obj)
% Place the UI object 'obj' on top of stack in the UIfigure 'appfig'
    
appHandles = appfig.Children;       % list all handles in app
hIdx = find(appHandles==obj);       % find index of obj in appHandles
% Create new index order of app handles
newOrder = [hIdx,setdiff(1:numel(appHandles),hIdx)]; 
% assign new stack order to app
appfig.Children = appHandles(newOrder);

Example:

appfig = app.myAppFig;  % Handle to your App figure
obj = app.UIAxes2;      % handle to the object that goes on top
uistackTop(app, appfig, obj)

Also see this answer for a function that moves a UI object to the bottom of the stack.

MATLAB: Is the order of child handles reversed when an object is queried for the ‘Children’ property

The behavior that is observed here is not a bug but instead a design decision which causes the most recently added child object's handle to appear at the top of the list of handles returned by the 'Children' property. This behavior can be observed in a variety of cases presently in MATLAB as follows:

1. Adding multiple line objects to an axes

2. Adding multiple uicontrols to a figure (uicontrols are children of the figure object)

3. Adding multiple axes to a figure (axes are children of the figure object)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Make UIAxes invisible/visible when stacked in App desginer..

MATLAB: Is the order of child handles reversed when an object is queried for the ‘Children’ property

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