Main Content

App Building Components

App Designer and UI figures support a large set of components for designing modern, full-featured applications. The tables below list the components that are available.

  • Common Components — Include components that respond to interactions, such as buttons, sliders, drop-down lists, and trees.

  • Axes — Include axes to create plots for data visualization and exploration.

  • Containers and Figure Tools — Include panels and tabs for grouping components, as well as menu bars.

  • Instrumentation Components — Include gauges and lamps for visualizing status, as well as knobs and switches for selecting input parameters.

  • Extensible Components — Include custom UI components that you author. Interface with third-party libraries to display content like widgets or data visualizations.

  • Toolbox Components — Include toolbox authored UI components. Requires additional toolbox license and installation.

All components are available programmatically. Most UI components are also available in the App Designer Component Library for you to drag and drop onto the canvas. To add components to an App Designer app that are not available in the Component Library, or that you want to add dynamically to the running app, see Add UI Components to App Designer Programmatically.

When calling graphics functions in App Designer, the workflow is slightly different than you typically use at the MATLAB® command line. For more information about how to call graphics functions in App Designer, see Display Graphics in App Designer.

Common Components

Axes

Axes InformationExample
UIAxes Properties

A mesh surface plot

Axes Properties
This object can be added programmatically only.

Two normalized histogram plots in the same axes. A blue histogram is centered near zero and an orange one is centered near one.

GeographicAxes Properties
This object can be added programmatically only.

Set of geographic axes that uses the 'colorterrain' basemap. A solid red line is plotted between two points: Imperial Beach, California and San Francisco, California. The two end points are marked with red asterisks.

PolarAxes Properties
This object can be added programmatically only.

Scatter chart in polar coordinates

Containers and Figure Tools

Dialogs and Notifications

Dialog InformationExample
uialert
This object can be added programmatically only.

An Invalid File dialog box displayed in front of a UI figure. A red octagon icon with a white exclamation point appears to the left of an alert message that says "File not found".

uiconfirm
This object can be added programmatically only.

A Confirm Save dialog box with the message "Saving these changes will overwrite previous changes." The options it presents are "Overwrite", "Save as new", and "Cancel".

uiprogressdlg
This object can be added programmatically only.

A progress dialog box displayed in front of a UI figure. The message displayed above the progress bar says "Loading your data". A blue progress bar shows that the process is one-third complete.

uisetcolor
This object can be added programmatically only.

Color picker dialog box that shows the standard colors, recent colors, and preview of the default color which is set to yellow

uigetfile
This object can be added programmatically only.

File selection dialog box

uiputfile
This object can be added programmatically only.

Save to file dialog box

uigetdir
This object can be added programmatically only.

Folder selection dialog box

uiopen
This object can be added programmatically only.

Load file into workspace dialog box

uisave
This object can be added programmatically only.

Save workspace variables dialog box

Instrumentation

Extensible Components

Toolbox Components

Apps created in App Designer or with the uifigure function support components in multiple additional products. To use these components, a valid license and installation of the associated product is required.

Related Topics