Opening stored figures directly in GUI

I've stumbled upon this problem which I thought would be easy to solve, but my limited experience with Matlab forced me to seek for help.

I have a figure stored in a .fig file, and I have a GUI with an 'axes' object. I would like to open the stored figure file and display the figure in the axes of the GUI. What is the best way to achieve this?

Thank you very much for your help!

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

This is not possible. An axes cannot be a container for a figure. You could load the figure, take a snapshot of it ( getframe or print ) and then display this as an image in the axes but all functionality will be gone.

What are you trying to do? Perhaps we could help you come up with a nicer solution.

[Lipa]

Thank you for your reply!

What I would like to do is the following: In one program, I create a surface plot which is then stored on disk as 'plot.fig'. Then, in another GUI program, I would like to bring up that stored figure for viewing with full functionality. It is straightforward to just open the figure in its own window using 'openfig', but I would much prefer if I could open it in some predefined space within the GUI (i.e. the "axes" object), and not in another window.

Any further ideas are most appreciated!

Answer 2

[Kevin Claytor]

You could transfer the data over reasonably fast with something like;

% Example of transfering data from one figure to another

f1 = figure;    % The figure we want to transfer to
h2 = subplot(3,3,4);    % The axes we want to transfer to

od = open('untitled.fig');  % Load our saved figure
%get(get(x,'CurrentAxes'))
% This command displays all the options we can
%   transfer over, for this example, I'll just transfer the data
datahandles = get(get(x,'CurrentAxes'),'Children');
for ii = 1:length(datahandles)
    set(datahandles(ii),'Parent',h2);
end

% Close the other figure
close(od)

You'll have to tweak it to transfer other properties (title, labels, etc) over, but that should get you started.

[Lipa]

Thank you for your reply! I will study this suggestion a bit more in detail (some things are new to me) and then will come back with more questions/comments.

[Cheng, Nestic]

I have the exactly same problem about this...I can easily open a .fig file with popping out another Figure window,but hardly put the .fig file into a axes(in GUI) that already exist. I've tried to use "axes(handles.axes_Copy1)" before I open my .fig file and it does not work. In this answer using "h2 = subplot(3,3,4);" to point to the axes we want to transfer to,but is there a way to transfer to "the axes in GUI"? really confusedˊˋ

[Jan]

@Cheng: As you found out, you cannot open a the contents of a fig file in an axes object. You can copy axes objects to axes objects using copyobj.

[Cheng, Nestic]

Thanks for reply!!! I've got some further question about using copyobj these days,try to copy axes objects to axes objects just as your mention(still failed :P) Therefor I write another Post to ask more about this! http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/275954-problem-with-transfer-information-from-a-axes-to-another-in-gui-using-copyobj