How to programmatically detect the difference between a figure and a random dialog or waitbar

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I have a case where I am defining a default figure create function. In the create function I want to format figures (intended for plotting on) in a certain fashion such as change the background color and add some annotation text in a couple of places. My current mechanism for detecting the difference between a figure for plotting and any other random dialog or waitbar is to look at the tag for the uicontrol. If the tag is empty that indicates it's a figure for plotting. However what if a user creates a figure and sets the tag for their figure? This scenario busts my logic. I want to define a more robust way to determine if a figure is for plotting or if it's just some other dialog or waitbar.
After some brainstorming with some other colleagues about the issue at hand we have decided to try and compile a comprehensive list of potential dialog and waitbar tags for a range of Matlab versions. Where can I find a comprehensive list for individual versions? If this is not feasible is there a better way to detect the difference other than using the tags?
  4 Comments
Ameer Hamza
Ameer Hamza on 1 Apr 2020
What about checking for the Children of the figure object. At the time of creation, if the figure does not have any object in it, then its Children will also return an empty array, which will mean that the figure was created for plotting.
f % figure handle
if isempty(f.Children)
% plot figure
else
% some other figure
end
Thomas Sawyer
Thomas Sawyer on 1 Apr 2020
The solution I ended up implementing from the context of the figure_CreateFcn is
isDialog = (strcmp(get(src, 'ToolBar'), 'none') || strcmp(get(src, 'ToolBar'), 'auto')) && strcmp(get(src, 'MenuBar') 'none');

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Accepted Answer

Fangjun Jiang
Fangjun Jiang on 31 Mar 2020
Can you use the 'menubar' property? If not, run get(f), get(w), get(d) to compare all properties to see if you can find any unique ID.
%%
f=figure;
w=waitbar(0.5,'please wait');
d=dialog('WindowStyle','normal');
get(f,'menubar')
get(w,'menubar')
get(d,'menubar')
ans =
'figure'
ans =
'none'
ans =
'none'
  5 Comments
Fangjun Jiang
Fangjun Jiang on 1 Apr 2020
figure, waitbar and dialog all return Figure object so it not too difficult to hack if someone wants to break your logic on purpose. 'handlevisibility' might be another candicate. It is 'on' for figure and 'callback' for waitbar and dialog.
Thomas Sawyer
Thomas Sawyer on 1 Apr 2020
I ended up just checking to see what the toolbar and menubar properties were set to. There is never a case where someone here wants to plot something and turn off those bars. Likewise I cannot think of any dialog where those are showing. I did discover that the function "dialog" creates a figure with one of the two set to 'auto'.

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