File Exchange Pick of the Week

April 9th, 2010

Dynamic Date Ticks

Jiro's pick this week is Dynamic Date Ticks by our fellow MathWorker (and an Application Engineer) Ameya. If you work with time series data, this is a must-have utility.

Have you ever wanted to plot a graph with dates along the x-axis? MATLAB has had a function called datetick for a long time, and it gives you a nice set of tick labels with date strings. But often times, you may want to interact with your plot by zooming and panning. Since datetick fixes the tick labels at the time of creation, the labels may disappear if you zoom in too far or pan away from the original limits. There are techniques you can employ to automatically update the tick labels after zooming and panning, or you can use Ameya's dynamicDateTicks.

Actually, there are a few entries on the File Exchange that provide automatic update of dateticks, one of which was selected as a Pick of the Week. Most of them leverage the callback behaviors of zoom and pan. What's unique about Ameya's function is that not only does it dynamically update the tick labels as you zoom and pan, it also shows year or day changes (so you always have the full date information), and displays data tips appropriately.

Comments

Give this a try and tell us what you think, or leave a comment for Ameya on the submission page.


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Published with MATLAB® 7.10

Author picture

By Jiro Doke

Jiro is an application engineer at MathWorks. His job allows him to evangelize about MATLAB by traveling around the country to various universities and companies. He is a MATLAB addict, but he doesn't seem to mind being labeled as one.

11:25 UTC | Posted in Picks | Permalink | 5 Comments »

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5 Responses to “Dynamic Date Ticks”

  1. Michael Robbins replied on April 9th, 2010 at 12:47 UTC :

    Good choice. We need more date functionality in MATLAB. A transparent date class is truly the way to go.

  2. Marcelo replied on April 9th, 2010 at 19:48 UTC :

    I have been using tlabel. It’s very flexible about different formats and also changes the marks as you zoom or pan.

  3. Sam G. replied on April 15th, 2010 at 23:37 UTC :

    Awesome piece of work. Thanks, you have solved my headache.

  4. Bob replied on April 16th, 2010 at 13:33 UTC :

    Michael, what do you mean by “transparent date class?” How would you use it, ideally? :)

    Thanks
    Bob

  5. Divya replied on June 30th, 2010 at 15:42 UTC :

    Could someone provide me an example of how to plot the date-time axis in dd-mm-yyyy HH:MM:SS in MATLAB. I have tried datetick but got only one value in the X axis displayed.

    I am reading the raw data from a txt file like the one shown below and would like to plot the date time.

    DATE TIME Temperature
    3-12-2010 12:00:00 16.303223
    3-12-2010 12:00:05 16.63046875
    3-12-2010 12:00:12 16.63046875
    3-12-2010 12:00:22 16.303223
    3-12-2010 12:00:45 16.63046875
    3-12-2010 12:01:03 16.63046875

    Thanks,
    Diana

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