MATLAB Creating Graphical User Interfaces

10 Lay Out a Programmatic UI

Property Values Description

Accelerator Alphabetic character Keyboard equivalent. Available

for menu items that do not have

submenus.

Checked off, on. Default is off. Menu check indicator

Enable on, off. Default is on. Controls whether a menu item can be

selected. When set to off, the menu

label appears dimmed.

HandleVisibility on, off. Default is on. Determines if an object's handle is

visible in its parent's list of children.

For menus, set HandleVisibility to

off to protect menus from operations

not intended for them.

Label String Menu label.

To display the & character in a label,

use two & characters in the string.

The words remove, default, and

factory (case sensitive) are reserved.

To use one of these as a label, prepend

a backslash (\) to the string. For

example, \remove yields remove.

Position Scalar. Default is 1. Position of a menu item in the menu.

Separator off, on. Default is off. Separator line mode

For a complete list of properties and for more information about the properties listed in

the table, see Uimenu Properties.

How Menus Affect Figure Docking

When you customize the menu bar or toolbar, you can control the display of the window's

docking controls by setting the DockControls property. You might not need menus for

your UI, but if you want the user to be able to dock or undock the UI, it must contain a

menu bar or a toolbar. This is because docking is controlled by the docking icon, a small

curved arrow near the upper-right corner of the menu bar or the toolbar, as the following

illustration shows.