uicontrol vs annotation render order

I was hoping to get uicontrols rendered below annotations. The order of creation of a uicontrol vs an annotation does not seem to matter, the annotation always seems to be below the control.

clf
set(gcf,'Units','normalized')
p = [0.0339    0.0452    0.1071    0.0476];
wtf2 = annotation('rectangle',[0 p(2) 1 0.1],'Color','g','FaceColor','g');
wtf = uicontrol('Style','Text','String','This is a test','Units','normalized','Position',p);
wtf3 = annotation('rectangle',[0 p(2) 1 0.1],'Color','b','FaceColor','b');

In the code example above neither annotation covers the uicontrol. Is this documented somewhere? Presumably I could use a textbox annotation to fix this behavior but I was hoping to understand the difference between annotations and uicontrols, particularly with regard to rendering.

[Walter Roberson]

If I recall correctly you are using a release from R2014b onwards? Because in releases before that, uicontrol were always on top.

[Jim Hokanson]

Oops, yes, using 2017a. It seems that uicontrols are still always on top.

Answer 1

[Amy]

Hi Jim - for more information on how graphics objects are rendered in releases since R2014b, try looking into these two documentation pages:

• Why are some components hidden or partially obscured?
• Graphics objects

If all you want is to hide the uicontrol beneath an annotation/rectangle, you could always just set its 'Visible' property to 'off'!

[Jim Hokanson]

Thanks Amy.

I don't actually see any mention of the relationship between annotations and uicontrols in the linked documentation.

I'm able to get the behavior I need by changing my text uicontrol to an annotation. The use case is specifically that I'm moving annotation lines and these lines may overlap with text. In that case I want the lines to hide the text. However, changing the visibility of the text means 1) I need to pay attention to the relationship between the line and the text (which I'm not currently doing) and 2) a potential partial hiding of the text (if the line could actually block the text) turns into a complete hiding of the text box.

Again, as I said I've managed to get a workaround. I guess that intuitively I expected rendering order of all things attached to the figure, would by default, be determined by their creation order (with maybe some mechanism for reordering post-hoc). Instead it seems like uicontrols and annotations have been artificially separated into two distinct groups for rendering.

Thanks again, Jim