Programmatically setting a radio button from within App Designer

I am trying to change the selected radio button with in a button group from within the app program.

I have an app for which I take the state of the app, put it into a dictionary and save that. Now I want to retrieve the dictionary, and then apply the recovered state definition to the app. This includes selecting the correct radio buttons.

I have the text associated with the selected button, but I can't figure out how to use that to change the selected button to the desired one. If I use a statement like the following: 'app.TelescopeTypeButtonGroup.SelectedObject.Text = Cassegrain ;' then is changes the text assocated with the selected button, but does not change the button that is selected.

I tried to do a series of commands that set the selected button value to "0", hoping that would cycle through all the buttons, but it didn't always cycle through all of the buttons. I have run out of work arounds. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Peter

Answer 1

[Voss]

You need to refer to the radio button object itself, e.g., using its name in the app structure:

app.TelescopeTypeButtonGroup.SelectedObject = app.Button5;

where app.Button5 refers to the appropriate radio button object in the button group.

Another, less direct, way is, given the Text of some radio button, get the appropriate radio button object from that and then set that to be the SelectedObject, e.g.:

button_txt = 'Cassegrain';
buttons = app.TelescopeTypeButtonGroup.Children;
labels = get(buttons,{'Text'});
idx = strcmp(labels,button_txt);
app.TelescopeTypeButtonGroup.SelectedObject = buttons(idx);

The attached app shows both ways in its startupFcn.

[Peter Cheimets]

Thank you very much.

Peter

[Voss]

You're welcome! Any questions, let me know. Otherwise, please "Accept" this answer. Thanks!

Answer 2

[Peter Cheimets]

This is what I ended up doing. I couldn't get the "get" statement to work. So I walked through the lables one by one in the while loop.

Note: state_dic is the dictionary with the app state, and state_dic_keys are the keys from the dictionary extracted so that I could walk through the dictionary in order and it has all of the names in place.

Peter

                    button_txt = char(state_dic{state_dic_keys(i)});
                    which_buttons = extractBefore(char(state_dic_keys(i)),'SelectedObject.Text');
                    buttons = [which_buttons,'Children'];
                    labels = eval([buttons]);
                    idx = 1; %initialize the value
                    while strcmp(labels(idx).Text,button_txt) == 0
                        idx = idx + 1; %inc idx if this isn't the right button
                    end
                    eval([buttons,'(',num2str(idx),').Value = 1;'])

[Voss]

which_buttons = extractBefore(char(state_dic_keys(i)),'SelectedObject.Text');

I assume which_buttons produced there is a character vector that's something like 'app.TelescopeTypeButtonGroup.', i.e., the name of the radio button group with a period on the end.

If that's true, then the code can be:

button_txt = char(state_dic{state_dic_keys(i)});
buttongroup = eval(extractBefore(char(state_dic_keys(i)),'.SelectedObject.Text'));
buttons = buttongroup.Children;
labels = get(buttons,{'Text'});
idx = strcmp(labels,button_txt);
buttongroup.SelectedObject = buttons(idx);

[Peter Cheimets]

This works.

Thanks again.

Peter

Answer 3

[Image Analyst]

I wouldn't use eval. What if you just set the other buttons also if setting the one you want doesn't change the others automatically, like

% Set radio button you want
app.radioButton1.Value = "on";
% Deselect others
app.radioButton2.Value = "off";
app.radioButton3.Value = "off";