how to close a waitbar under R2014b ?

I have created a waitbar as follows:

h = waitbar(0,'1','Name','Approximating pi...',...
            'CreateCancelBtn',...
            'setappdata(gcbf,''canceling'',1)');

To kill this waitbar, we have to use delete(h) instead of close(h).

The problem is that during the development and testings, it is possible that the h variable is cleared or overwritten. Then the waitbar is still present but the handle is lost. In that case, how can I close the waitbar? Of course, clicking the closing X button does not work.

Thanks for your support.

Answer 1

[David Sanchez]

From documentation:

You should call delete to remove a wait bar when you give it a CloseRequestFcn, as in the preceding code; calling close does not close it, and makes its Cancel and Close Window buttons unresponsive. This happens because the figure's CloseRequestFcn recursively calls itself. In such a situation you must forcibly remove the wait bar, for example like this:

set(0,'ShowHiddenHandles','on')
delete(get(0,'Children'))

However, as issuing these commands will delete all open figures—not just the wait bar—it is best never to use close in a CloseRequestFcn to close a window.

Answer 2

[Adam]

hFigures = allchild( groot );

will give you the handles of all figures from which you can find the waitbar as having a tag 'TMWWaitbar' if you didn't set a different tag yourself or obviously the tag you set if you did.

Then you can get it's handle from that list (hFigures will be an array of handles if you have more figures than just the waitbar) and call delete on it as normal. e.g.

hWaitbar = hFigures( arrayfun( @(h) strcmp( h.Tag, 'TMWWaitbar' ), hFigures ) );
delete( hWaitbar );

Answer 3

[Denis]

Great! Thank you all!

[Titus Edelhofer]

Hi Denis,

you should mark the question then as answered, although in this case you have to choose between two equally valid answers ;-).

Titus