How to update a "child" figure?

I have a manually generated gui which consists of a parent figure with a number of child figures laid out on uipanels.

If I click something in one of the child figure I can cause something to happen in the parent figure using a figure handle passed to the child figure as an argument when I call the function that creates it.

Is there are way of triggering in the other direction, i.e. once the child has been created, if I click something in the parent figure how do I cause something to happen in the child figure?

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

Save the handle to the child figure in appdata and set it as necessary:

setappdata(hParent,'hChild1',hChild);

On click:

hChild = getappdata(hParent,'hChild');
set(hChild,...)

[Paul Kelly]

Thanks Sean, but I'm not quite sure I understand. What I want to do is to update an axes in the child figure. Can I save a figure handle in the app data? If I can I'm not doing it write.

[Paul Kelly]

sorry *right

[Sean de Wolski]

Sure you can save the figure handle in appdata, that's what my above setappdata command did.

doc setappdata/doc getappdata for more info

Answer 2

[Paul Kelly]

Thanks Sean, I understood your example but I missed some details.

For anyone who is interested, this is the example I created to check how to do it.

This is the parent GUI

function exampleParentGUI()

%   Create the GUI parent
hParent = figure( ...
    'Name', 'Parent', ...
    'NumberTitle', 'off', ...
    'Units', 'pixels', ...
    'Position',[200 200 640 480], ...
    'MenuBar', 'none', ...
    'Resize', 'off');

%   Place a button on the parent
uicontrol(hParent, ...
    'Style', 'pushbutton', ...
    'Units', 'pixels ', ...
    'Position', [12, 12, 96, 24], ...
    'String', 'Parent action', ...
    'Callback', {@callback_ParentAction});

%   Allocate an area for the child (normalised units)
childPos = [0 0.5 1 0.5];
createChildPanel(hParent, childPos)

%   Grab the function handle for the child function
parentDoSomething = getappdata(hParent, 'childActionFn');

      function callback_ParentAction(hObj, ~)
          parentAct = ...
              sprintf('Someone clicked the %s button\n', get(hObj, 'String'));
          parentDoSomething(parentAct)
      end
  end

and this is the child

function createChildPanel(hParentArg, normalisedPos)

%   Create panel
childPanel = uipanel(hParentArg, ...
    'Units', 'normalized ', ...
    'Position', normalisedPos, ...
    'BackgroundColor', 'red');

%   Place a button on the child panel
uicontrol(childPanel, ...
    'Style', 'pushbutton', ...
    'Units', 'pixels ', ...
    'Position', [12, 12, 96, 24], ...
    'String', 'Child action', ...
    'Callback', {@callback_ChildAction});

%   Place a static text 
hText = uicontrol(childPanel, ...
    'Style', 'text', ...
    'Units', 'pixels ', ...
    'Position', [120, 12, 96*5, 24], ...
    'HorizontalAlignment', 'left', ...
    'String', 'Nobody has done anything yet');

%   Make childDoSomething available to the parent
setappdata(hParentArg, 'childActionFn', @childDoSomething);

      function childDoSomething(childAct)
          set(hText, 'String', childAct);
      end

      function callback_ChildAction(hObj, ~)
          actStr = ...
              sprintf('Someone clicked the %s button\n', get(hObj, 'String'));
          childDoSomething(actStr)
      end
  end