MATLAB: How to put a waitbar in an existing figure in MATLAB 7.8 (R2009a)

guihandle graphicsMATLABwaitbar

I would like to put a waitbar in an existing figure, such as a GUI figure, instead of having it appear in a separate window.

Best Answer

To put a waitbar in an existing figure, you must transfer all the elements of a waitbar out of the default separate figure window and put it them on the existing figure.
Specifically, you must assign the parent of all these elements to be a handle to your existing figure rather than the handle to the separate figure. See the following code as an example of how to do this:
%grabs a handle 'f' to a figure. 
f = figure;  
% Creates a WAITBAR in a new figure (by default) 
h = waitbar(0,'Please wait...'); %   
% The child of the waitbar is an axes object.  Grab the axes 
% object 'c' and set its parent to be your figure f so that it now 
% resides on figure f rather than on the old default figure. 
c = get(h,'Children'); 
set(c,'Parent',f);  % Set the position of the WAITBAR on your figure 
set(c,'Units','Normalized','Position',[.5 .5 .3 .05]);  
% Close the default figure 
close(h);  
% The above steps only need to occur once to place the waitbar on the figure. 
% Now when you go to use the WAITBAR you can just call the waitbar with two 
% inputs: waitbar(x,h) where x is how much of the bar you want filled and f 
% is the handle to your figure. 
steps = 1000; 
for step = 1:steps     
  % computations take place here     
  waitbar(step / steps,f)     
  pause(.01) 
end
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