Change string of static text boxes whose tag contains "Output"

Hi all,

I am writing some analysis software in 2015a with GUIDE.

I am looking to push a button that will reset the GUI to how it opened, emptying (by setting string) ALL edit boxes (easy) and all static text fields that are used as an output. I do not want to empty static text boxes whose tag contains "Text" as these are GUI labels next to edit boxes.

Currently I have the code below, but I don't know how to adapt it for the above...

% Empty All Static Text Boxes Whose Tag Contains "Output"
set(findall(handles.figure1,'Tag','Output'),'string',''); % findall finds invisible objects as well (findobj does not)

My previous attempt was:

% Get All Static Text Tags
AllStaticTextTags = findall(handles.figure1,'style','text')

% Find All Static Text Tags Containing "Output"
StaticTextTagsContainingOutputIdx = contains(AllStaticTextTags,'Output'); % returns 1 if contains it 0 if not
StaticTextTagsContainingOutput = AllStaticTextTags(StaticTextTagsContainingOutputIdx);

% Empty All Static Text Boxes Whose Tag Contains "Output"
set(StaticTextTagsContainingOutput,'string','');

But understandably that doesn't work due to:

Undefined function 'contains' for input arguments of type 'matlab.ui.control.UIControl'.

Currently I am closing the window and re-running the main script but this is slow and inefficient.

EDIT: To clarify, the tags contain other letters also... I am looking to ONLY empty strings of static text boxes that have "Output" in their tag name.

Thanks,

Matt.

[Dennis]

Do you have other objects with 'output' tag? If not this should work:

 txthandle=findobj(handles.figure1,'Tag','Output')
  for k=1:numel(txthandle)
     txthandle(k).String=[''];
  end

[Matt]

Does that not do the same as this?

set(findall(handles.figure1,'Tag','Output'),'string','');

The problem with that is that the tags aren't just "Output". e.g. "CalculationOfSpringRateOutput" so I need to be able to empty the strings of ONLY the static text boxes that contain "Output". Some static text boxes are tagged "DataEntry1TextLabel" for example.

[Adam]

The handles of all your GUI components are stored directly on the handles struct. I would have thought it would be faster to interrogate its fields using something like

names = fieldnames( handles );
idx = contains( fieldnames( handles ), 'Output' );
names = names( idx );

for n = 1:numel( names )
   handles.( names{ n } ).String = [];
end

That is off the top of my head and may contain errors.

Using findall seems very inefficient for a self-contained GUI and seems a very brittle way of doing things though. Personally I would keep an array of the relevant text handles that I populate at the creation of the UI if I were to do this. Then setting them to empty would be trivial.

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Matt - the function contains looks to have been introduced in r2016b so that function is most not likely available to you (given that your version is r2015a).

You can try the following though. Continue as before to get all the handles to the static text controls

 allStaticTextHandles = findall(handles.figure1,'style','text');

Then get the tags for each one (note that I'm using code for r2014a so it may be different for your version)

 allStaticTextTags = get(allStaticTextHandles, 'Tag');

And now you could use strfind to find those tags that contain the string 'Output'. The result of

 strfind(allStaticTextTags, 'Output')

will be a cell array of empty arrays or indices of where the string 'Output' starts in the tag. For example,

 ans = { []; [5]; []}

and so you would need to find which of these is non-empty and then clear the contents of that static text control.

[Matt]

Thank you. I don't know why I didn't think of that - i've done something similar before.

I have implemented something similar. I now have a 121x1 Cell of tags containing "Output" but I have come unstuck in using these in the handles input of the set command/function.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Matt]

I have managed it with a for loop but I wonder if there is a more optimal way to achieve this? Could it be vectorised?

allStaticTextHandles = findall(handles.figure1,'style','text');

allStaticTextTags = get(allStaticTextHandles, 'Tag');

StaticTextTagsWithOutputCheck = strfind(allStaticTextTags, 'Output');

IndexOfTagsContainingOutput = find(~cellfun(@isempty,StaticTextTagsWithOutputCheck));

TagsContainingOutput = allStaticTextTags(IndexOfTagsContainingOutput,1);

for count = 1:length(TagsContainingOutput)
    set(handles.(TagsContainingOutput{:,1}),'String',''); % findall finds invisible objects as well (findobj does not)
end

[Geoff Hayes]

Matt - something like this worked for me

 allStaticTextControlHandles = findobj(handles.figure1,'style','text')
 staticTextControldToClear = cell2mat(cellfun(@(x)~isempty(x),strfind(get(allStaticTextControlHandles,'Tag'),'Output'), 'UniformOutput',false));
 set(allStaticTextControlHandles(staticTextControldToClear),'String','');

[Matt]

Sorry for the late response. Not sure why I used a for loop in my solution - useless! Your solution is perfect, and much neater - thank you Geoff, I couldn't have solved this problem without your help.