Okay, call the figure setting ‘visibility’ ‘off’ and it won’t pop up in front yet will return its handle. But if it doesn’t exist it will create a new instance.

Nick’s method requires knowing the handle.

get(hMyFig, 'Visible')

Using findobj with or without visibility returns an empty answer.

 hiddenFigs = findobj('Type','figure','-and','Visible','off')

I was only able to get findobj to work if I pass it the handles, which I don’t know unless you call the gui and then if the gui wasn’t open it creates a new instance.

 object_handles = findall(handle_list)

For now I’ve created a gui that is always hidden, opens up all the others, and records their handles so that everyone can access the handles without invoking the individual guis. This works unless I get an error that causes a hidden gui to quit. Then weird things happen. I think I can use findall or findobj to test for each gui before calling it or its sub-functions.

Does your myFig() function call figure? If it does then each call to myFig() will create a new figure.

To simply reference your figure, use the hMyFig variable which is the handle to your figure.

% get the figure's visibility
% without creating a new figure
myFigVisible = get(hMyFig, 'Visible');

As far as finding all hidden figures, you can use the the findobj function to search for graphics objects with certain attributes:

% find hidden figures
hiddenFigs = findobj('Type','figure','-and','Visible','off')

When I do this:

h = figure('visible','off');
hh = figure('visible','off','handlevisibility','off');
get(h,'visible')
get(hh,'visible')

I get ‘off’ as my answer to both get statements and no figures popping up. I suspect you have more going on. Please contact support with full details and they should be able to help you.

–Loren

Nice description of User Managed Objects. I’m working with guide, creating figures that are sometimes hidden. I have two issues. How to get the figure’s handle or visible parameter when hidden without causing the figure to come to the front. And how to find all hidden figures that haven’t been deleted.

hMyFig = myFig();  % returns a handle to myFig but also
                   % makes if visible and brings it to
                   % the front.

myFigVisible = get( myFig(), 'Visible'); % Does the same.

When the object is created I create a GUI figure window, and I want them to always exist as a pair. I have added a ‘CloseRequestFcn’ callback that closes the figure and deletes the object if a user hits the close button. This works fine. However, I cannot figure out how to get the GUI figure to close if I clear the singleton object. I tried overloading the ‘delete’ method(which normally works) but in the case of the clearing of a persistent object it seems that the ‘delete’ method is not called.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Kieran

Thank you for replying and your ideas. I have a lot to learn and experiment with now.

I don’t plan to make wide spread use of this technique for the obvious pitfalls like hidden dependence, but there is some functionality well served by it.

Thanks again.

Stephen

With regard to Stephen’s question: one guideline for building user-managed objects is to allow the user to assign a unique name to the object. This makes it easy to find them later. For example:

———–
timer(‘period’,0.25, ‘name’, ‘myTimer’);

% much later … in some other function
h = timerfind(‘name’, ‘myTimer’);
stop(h);
delete(h);
———–

This strategy works with pretty much all user-managed objects in MATLAB.

If you do use persistent variables, you have to be careful about how multiple instances of the class work. Today you have 2 more choices that don’t limit you to a singleton pattern, nested functions or the object system introduced in R2008a. There will be a blog on the latter coming soon. In the meantime, check out the documentation on the class system.

–Loren