Appdesigner drop down (popupmenu) keyboard navigation

Hello,

I just migrated my GUIDE app to AppDesigner and one of the features that I really liked in GUIDE is the ability to navigate through drop down menus (popupmenu) using the keyboard. Meaning, I can push a letter on the keyboard to select the option where the first character matches that letter.

Is this possible on the drop down menus in AppDesigner?

In principle I don't need the UI element to be a drop down menu, I just need something that accepts keyboard input but not a "free form" answer. So the keyboard can be used to narrow down a set of predetermined options.

Much appreciated,

Answer 1

[Monika Phadnis]

'uidropdown' component supports this workflow as well.

If you set the 'Editable' property to 'on', users can enter text in dropdown to narrow down available values.

Refer the documentation for this property: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/uidropdown.html#buict8f-1_sep_shared-Editable

In case you want to add further restrictions or define behaviors when dropdown value is changed, you can do so in the 'ValueChangedFcn' callback function.

Refer the documentation for this property: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/uidropdown.html#buict8f-1_sep_shared-ValueChangedFcn

Hope this helps!

[Jonathan Avesar]

Thank you so much Monika. I am aware of this feature but it isn't exactly the same as in the GUIDE app. If there is one entry that starts with 'a' for example, It doesn't allow us to solely press 'a, tab' and move onto the next group.

Our app had many of these drop downs in series of the tab order and it would be convenient to press 'a, tab, g, tab, etc...'. But no worries, I realized that this form of data input was innefficient anyway and instead redesigned the GUI to utilize an editable table instead.

Thanks!