MATLAB Basics: Adding a table to a GUI

MATLAB GUI developers often want to have a mini-spreadsheet in their GUI. This can be done with a new widget added to the set of controls available in GUIDE. Now with UITABLE you can add that capability. This video shows how to add a table for display, then makes it editable and adds a callback such that MATLAB code is run whenever a cell in the table is edited. The data is not linked to the variables in the workspace, so this callback shows you how to pull data out of the table whenever it is updated.

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10 Responses to “MATLAB Basics: Adding a table to a GUI”

Harold Figueroa replied on May 7th, 2008 at 3:33 pm :

So are these tables only numeric, or can we use a mixed type cell array to populate them?

Also I am currently using 7.5 and see that these tables are available but undocumented. It seems like in this version the ‘data’ is a java object.

Brett replied on May 7th, 2008 at 9:56 pm :

Doug, nice post. One thing, though: it occurs to me that you haven’t shown us how to use/share the value of the variable DATA (from the data in the table) outside of the workspace of the cellEditCallback workspace. There are several ways to do it–addressing the ways, and their relative merits, would make a nice follow-up blog!

Ryan replied on May 10th, 2008 at 10:43 am :

Brett, I agree. Given that the uitable is a new addition to MATLAB it would be great to see more discussion about various access methods.

Doug replied on May 12th, 2008 at 8:24 am :

Harold,

UITable was undocumented, but available, for some releases in the past.

Some features like this are available, but undocumented, for various reasons. Sometimes they are there so that we can use them in making tools for MATLAB. These features are undocumented because we need the flexibility to change the interface for a while. If you find undocumented features, you need to be aware that the interface can change or be removed in future releases.

-Doug

Malcolm Lidierth replied on May 13th, 2008 at 10:12 am :

As far as access is concerned, the undocumented uitable of old provided cut and paste options from a uicontextmenu but the new version does not. Is that something that will be addressed in future releases?

Doug replied on May 13th, 2008 at 10:31 am :

Malcolm,

This suggestion has been entered into our internal enhancement request database. Thanks for the suggestion.

Doug

Austin DeHart replied on June 13th, 2008 at 11:53 am :

Hello Doug,

I have a gui with a uitable that works well when you hit enter after each cell edit, but when you hit tab after editing a cell’s contents, the CellEditCallback is not executed. Is there a fix for this?

Thanks,
Austin DeHart

Doug replied on June 13th, 2008 at 1:29 pm :

Austin,

This is a known issue. I see that it has been fixed in the next release.

Doug

Keerthi Nagaraj replied on July 21st, 2008 at 6:29 pm :

Hey Doug,

My question follows the previous post here. I am trying to edit the cells of a table. It works well if I hit tab after entering data. However, if I choose the contents of a cell by mouse-click-and-drag, and edit it, unless I click in another cell, the CellEditCallback is not called. I tend to edit the last cell, and then directly press a button that processes the data. So, I end up missing the data on the last cell I edit. How can I rectify this?

By the way, I am sincerely grateful for the most educative and helpful posts. I even considered developing GUI, solely due to your videos.

Thank you very much,
Keerthi

Doug replied on July 29th, 2008 at 3:37 pm :

Keerthi,

Our developers are aware of that behavior. A change in behavior is likely in an upcoming release.

Doug

About

Doug Hull is an Application Engineer at The MathWorks. A MATLAB user since 1994, he gets paid to live, eat, and breathe MATLAB! This blog is dedicated to promoting the File Exchange by highlighting files and original video content.

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