Plot disappears after axes command

I have a GUI where i plot two curves in the same figure. later in the program i want to plot a third curve in the same figure. To do so i first choose that figure to plot in with the axes command. When i do so one of the previous curves disappears and i can't understand why. Someone who knows?

[Adam]

Are you using hold on status?

[Joakim Magnusson]

No i use plotyy to plot the first two curves. Now i also tried using hold on after plotyy but that didn't change anything.

[Adam]

And are you keeping hold of all handles and plotting explicitly on the correct axes rather than just relying on whatever gca is giving you? It would help if you showed some code, otherwise it is just guessing.

[Brendan Hamm]

An example of actual code would be useful, but using the axes command creates an axes and does NOT tell the subsequent plot which Axes to plot on.

[Joakim Magnusson]

Yes i have several axes and I have handles to all of them. Ok, then i think i have misunderstood what the axes command does. But i can't find any other way to do it.

First i choose and plot the axes from my GUI like this:

%The AXES command selects the set of axes to plot in,
  axes(handles.viewCAM_handles.axes_posVelMA);

    % Calculate startvalues for graph
    MAPos = handles.varViewMAPosCAM(1);
    velV = handles.varViewSLVelCAM(1);
    posV = handles.varViewSLPosCAM(1);

    % Calculate graph vectors
    MAPos = [MAPos handles.varViewMAPosCAM(1:end-1)];
    velV = [velV handles.varViewSLVelCAM(1:end-1)];
    posV = [posV handles.varViewSLPosCAM(1:end-1)];

    % Plot
    [AX, h1, h2] = plotyy(MAPos, posV, MAPos, velV, 'plot', 'stairs');

And then in another callback for a pushbutton, I want to do this (the values have changed so I am not plotting the same thing again):

%The AXES command selects the set of axes to plot in,
    axes(handles.viewCAM_handles.axes_posVelMA);

      % Calculate graph vectors
      MAPos = graphData.MAPos;
      velV = graphData.velV;
      posV = graphData.posV;

      % Plot
      [AX, h1, h2] = plotyy(MAPos, posV, MAPos, velV, 'plot', 'stairs');

But as i said, when i do the axes command the second time one curve I plotted earlier disappears. Now i understand that axes just creates an axes, so what should i use instead?

[Adam]

Are you using R2016a or later? If so the help appears to now say that plotyy is "not recommended", although it doesn't say why. It says you should use 'yyaxis' instead, which is a newer function.

[Stephen23]

Actually the axes documentation does describe one syntax which lets you provide an axes handle and it will make those axes the current axes: " axes(h) makes existing axes h the current axes and brings the figure containing it into focus"

However I would advise against using this in serious code, and instead always explicitly specify the axes in every plot function:

 plotyy(axh,...)

Almost all plot functions support this, and it is ultimately much simpler and much more robust. It prevents users' clicking from changing the behavior of your code!

Answer 1

[Joakim Magnusson]

The command:

set(gcf, 'currentaxes', handles.viewCAM_handles.axes_posVelMA)

did the trick. Now I have trouble with wrong y-axis values but that's another problem.

[Adam]

plotyy, in common with all main plotting functions (possibly some older ones in toolboxes are exceptions, I'm not sure), has an overload that takes an explicit axes handle as its first argument.

I would strongly recommend to always use this form rather than trying to set which axes is in focus and then plotting with that as an assumption. Often that works fine, but if, for example, the user is able to click on a UI or bring a different figure into focus while the code is running this can lead to unexpected results.

[Joakim Magnusson]

Nice! I didn't know that, thanks!