MATLAB: Uitabgroup seems to ignore stacking order

MATLABuitabgroup

I create an app designer app in R2016b which consists of various ui components, including the following:

uitabgroup which occupies the full uifigure
multiple uipanels which overlay the uitabgroup, but whose parent is the uifigure

In R2016b, the panels showed up just fine, but I just upgraded to R2019a, and the panels are hidden behind the uitabgroup, regardless of the order of uifigure.Children.

As a test, I added a new uipanel that partially obscures one of my previous uipanels, and proved to myself that flip(app.uifigure.Children) still works as expected to reorder the stack order of the components.

It seems to me like only the uitabgroup ignores the stacking order, where it previously worked.

Best Answer

I submitted a ticket to Mathworks and got a solution. This is a known bug that affects R2019a and was fixed in R2019b. As a workaround in R2019a, the following lines of code will fix the stacking order.

drawnow;
app.fig.Children = flip(app.fig.Children);
app.fig.Children = flip(app.fig.Children);

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Multiple plots in uitab/uitabgroup

Each of your

   axes('parent',tab1)

and similar is creating a new axes and making it the default axes. The default position is used for the axes. You are not setting the axes color to 'none' so the new axes is "on top of" the old and hiding it.

A better structure:

h_figure_1 = figure(1);
h_tabgroup = uitabgroup(h_figure_1);
tab1 = uitab(h_tabgroup,'Title','y relative to z');
tab2 = uitab(h_tabgroup,'Title','y relative to z and n');
tab1_axes = axes('parent', tab1);
hold(tab1_axes, 'on');
tab2_axes1 = subplot(tab2, 2, 1, 1);
hold(tab2_axes1, 'on');
tab2_axes2 = sbplot(tab2, 2, 1, 2);
hold(tab2_axes2, 'on');
while true
   % Ask user to upload data for z and n, given x and y
   plot(tab1_axes, x, y/z);
   plot(tab2_axes1, x, y/(z+n));
   plot(tab2_axes2, x, y/n);
   if input('Run again? 1 - yes, 0 - no') ~= 1; break; end
end

MATLAB: Uitabgroup with tabs from different .fig files

The problem is that what is defined in a .fig will always be a figure, not a panel that can simply be parented by your tab. A figure cannot be parented by anything.

One thing you could try (I haven't done so I'm not sure if it would work) is to launch your figure (i.e. the one that represent a single tab), making it invisible (you can set 'Visible' to 'off' in GUIDE itself.

Then, assuming everything you want within that .fig is in a panel you could try re-parenting the panel from the .fig to your uitab. This would probably involve some unpleasant use of findall or similar to fish the panel handle out of your invisible figure, but it might work.

I would suggest creating the simplest test case you can to see if this works rather than on your real code. Just create a .fig with a panel in it and some slider or whatever and then create your uitab on command line or in a script and try locating the panel handle from the launched figure and reparenting it.

Personally I tend to do programmatic UIs when I use tabs, but it is a big inconvenience (though GUIDE performance is so bad nowadays it is less of an inconvenience than it might have been!)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Multiple plots in uitab/uitabgroup

MATLAB: Uitabgroup with tabs from different .fig files

Related Question