How to keep a GUI in sync with internal state?

Hello, everyone.

My question is the following:

Suppose you have a fairly large figure with many tables and other components.

What is displayed on this components is defined as a function of come internal state. For example, you have a structure in "guidata", which contains some geographical information, and your gui has a map to display the objects and some lists/tables to list them. The displayed information may also depend on external calls. For example, the displayed behaviour may depend on requests to a meteo server to get weather information.

This structure may get modified by various means: user modifies with figure controls, creates some files in a directory or maybe even directly via matlab console.

What I want is a (relatively) synchronized state of the GUI with the data structure. In fact, I have a function "refresh_view", which does the display, and in theory, I could create a timer object which would call it once in a while, but(!) I want to something more efficient. Say, I'd like the refresh function to be called only when the state structure is changed.

Could I do that?

Theoretically, I'd like something like waitfor(gcf, state). I'd call it in a separate thread and it would be running in an endless loop sleeping, waiting for state changes.

Any suggestions?