How can I increase the number of decimal places displayed on app designer UITable?

I am working on an app that ultimately produces 4 separate tables, each containing 4 columns of data. For simplicity, I am only including a single example, as I would think the process should be identical for all 4 tables, aside from the name of each table. All of the tables currently only show 4 decimal places. I would like to show more than this. I tried putting the following code in my startup function:

 function startupFcn(app)
            clc  
            close all

            app.UITable.ColumnFormat = {'long','long','long','long'}; %4x 'long' - 1 for each column?

This does not seem to work, as all of the tables still only display 4 decimal places. Any help would much appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

[Voss]

Maybe some code is modifying the uitable after the startupFcn executes, because the code you've shown should work.

Here it is working with uitables in figures (since uifigures can't be created in the forum environment):

data = rand(3,4);
n_col = size(data,2);

f_args = {'Position',[10 10 840 100]};
t_args = {'Units','normalized','Position',[0 0 1 1], ...
    'ColumnWidth',repmat({200},1,n_col),'Data',data};

% a table with default ColumnFormat
f = figure(f_args{:});
t = uitable(f,t_args{:});

% another table, identical to the first, except with ColumnFormat 'long'
f = figure(f_args{:});
t = uitable(f,t_args{:});
t.ColumnFormat = repmat({'long'},1,n_col);

I have also confirmed that it works with uifigures in R2022a.

[Jack Lebar]

So at the end of one of my functions is where I actually write the data to the table. So, based on your feedback, I tried to format the columns after writing the data to the table (see below). FYI 'X', 'Y', and 'Zfl' are each 16420x1 matrices.

   t1=table(X,Y,Zfl);
   app.UITable.Data = t1;
   app.UITable.ColumnFormat = {'long','long','long','long'};

Unfortunately, this did not work as the table still displays only 4 decimal places. It did however, produce this warning (this warning also showed up with the format command in the startup function, I just failed to notice):

Warning: 'ColumnFormat' value has no effect when 'Data' value is a table array. 

After seeing this, I changed my original syntax to create a cell array instead of a table in hopes that would resolve the issue:

   t1={X,Y,Zfl};
   app.UITable.Data = t1;
   app.UITable.ColumnFormat = {'long','long','long','long'};

Unfortunately this did not work either and produced the following error:

Error setting property 'Data' of class 'Table':
Data within a cell array must have size [1 1]

Any ideas?

[Voss]

A cell array would work, if each cell contained a scalar, i.e.,

app.UITable.Data = num2cell([X,Y,Zfl]);

However, why not use the numeric matrix directly?

app.UITable.Data = [X,Y,Zfl];

And since that's three columns (since each of X, Y, Zfl is a column vector), the ColumnFormat would be:

app.UITable.ColumnFormat = {'long','long','long'};

[Jack Lebar]

Perfect, that worked! Thank you. I am pretty new to App Designer so I didn't know you could write the matrix directly to the table like that. I thought because it was a table you had to feed it a "table" format. And yes sorry about the 4 columns. My table will eventually be 4 columns but I haven't yet figured out how to correctly calculate the values for the 4th column haha, so just 3 for now, with one placeholder. Thanks again for your help!

[Voss]

You're welcome!