Can you create GUI class elements in a loop?

Hi everybody. I am writing a GUI in which 32 toggle buttons function as status indicators. I have chosen to use toggle buttons because of their clear appearance. However, creating 32 buttons in essentially the same manner is very tedious and cluttered. Is there more efficient a way I could do this?

Here is all the relevant information about my program. I am defining everything in a handle class:

 classdef x_GUI < handle
   properties
      bit1
      bit2
      ....

These properties are then initialized in a function:

function app = x_GUI

Now creating the elements in this function the tedious way works fine. For example,

app.bit1 = uicontrol('Style','togglebutton',....)

This correctly displays the elements in the GUI, allows me to reference them later (i.e. get(app.bit1,'Value')) and outputs "x_GUI with properties bit1: [1x1 UIControl] ..."

when the script is executed to let me know that the property in the class has been altered. But I have to do this 32 times.

So when I tried to write a loop to save time and code, the element displayed properly, but in "x_GUI with properties bit1: [ ]..."

meaning that the property in the class was not edited. I tried using a for loop with

 sprintf(app.bit%d,i) = uicontrol(...)

and creating an array

 bit_handles = {app.bit1 ...} and then doing bit_handles{i} = uicontrol(...).

Both created the elements properly, but neither actually referenced the property in the class meaning bit1: [ ] still. Essentially, my problem is actually creating handles for the elements that are based off of the properties in the class.

Does anyone know a way I could effectively reference class properties in a for loop? Thank you very much for your time!

Answer 1

[Jan]

I'm not sure, what your problem is. So just some thoughts:

"sprintf(app.bit%d,i) = uicontrol(...)"? Do you mean:

for k = 1:32
  app.(sprintf('bit%d', k)) = uicontrol(...)
end

Note that you hide an index in the name of the fields. Why not using an array instead?

for k = 1:32
  app.bit(k) = uicontrol(...)
end

Then you can obtain and set the properties of all objects directly:

get(app.bit, 'Value')
set(app.bit, 'BackgroundColor', [1,1,0])

[sicilian27]

Thank you Jan. I don't know why I didn't think of just creating a single property 'bit' and using the array idea like that. That made things much easier and cleaner.