MATLAB: How to hide a figure instead of deleting it

delete-figuredelete-functionfigurefigure-visibilityguihide-figurematlab gui

Hi,

Is there any way I can change the DeleteFcn of a figure to not delete the figure but only make it invisible?

Best Answer

If you over-ride the CloseRequestFcn you can have it do whatever you tell it. In general you should always have this function call delete on the figure if you over-ride it because that is expected behaviour and if you don't the figure will not get deleted.

So if you create a CloseRequestFcn that just does something else and does not delete the figure than it will stay alive and you can switch its 'Visible' property off and do whatever else you wish.

I do this for docking and undocking panels in one of my workflows. I have a panel that is undockable and, because it is part of the workflow I don't want the user to simply be able to delete the panel when it is an undocked figure I program the CloseRequestFcn to redock it in the main figure.

The interaction between DeleteFcn, CloseRequestFcn and one or two others that are similar can be confusing, but they are explained in the help as to when each is called and what its function is. I never remember so have to look it up each time I want to do something out of the ordinary with this.

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MATLAB: Function open/close for GUI

OpeningFcn

is called on GUI creation and

CloseRequestFcn

is called when the GUI closes, but you have to explicitly add this in GUIDE by right-clicking on the figure in GUIDE and choosing the callback. Then you can put code in it.

DeleteFcn

is also called when the window closes. I forget the differences between this and CloseRequestFcn now, but off the top of my head the CloseRequestFcn should delete the gui (which will call DeleteFcn) otherwise it will not get deleted.

MATLAB: Programmatically hiding ‘linkdata’ information bar

Had the same problem, you can control it using the datamanager.linkplotmanager:

dpm = datamanager.linkplotmanager;
dpm.Figures(1).Panel.close

The problem is that the datamanager.linkplotmanager figures don't reference the figure handle, so if the first plot you link data on is figure 5, in the datamanager it is listed as dpm.Figures(1). And it will remain dpm.Figures(1) until you close figure 5. I ended up simply making a for loop to close all the Panels on all my plots with linkdata on.

dpm = datamanager.linkplotmanager;
for xx = 1:1:length(dpm.Figures)  
  dpm.Figures(xx).Panel.close
end

Best Answer

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