Searching for text in listbox without deselecting current choice

Hi all,

I have a list of 23,000 choices in a listbox in my GUI. I need to be able to select about 10 options at once. I have the multiselect setup, but because I have 23,000 entries, I can't manually scroll through to select the entries I want. The only way to search through the entries is to type, but when I type, it deselects whatever I had already selected.

Is there any way to implement a search bar above the listbox that will search through, but not select/deselect what appears in the listbox until I click the result?

That was just my idea, if there is a better solution feel free to share.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Ingrid]

why not add a table to your GUI where you store the options that you click? Just add a pushbutton that clears the table when you want to select a new list. This seems the easiest way to implement this

[Anthony]

I'm going to see if this works, I like this idea a lot. Even better than what I had described.

[Image Analyst]

You might think of a better way than presenting your user with a listbox 23,000 lines long. It must be torture to scroll through that to find about 10 that you want to select. Maybe a popup or radio buttons to filter the list to narrow it down to a manageable number, instead of something that would choke a whale.

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

You can get all the listbox items in a cell array like this:

allItems = get(handles.listbox1, 'String');

Now you can search all those items with ismember() or strfind(). It will not change what items are, or are not, selected.

[Anthony]

That would work well if I was the one using this, but I'm trying to do this all with a GUI so someone who doesn't know MATLAB will still be able to use the simple program I'm writing.