adding to handles while loop is running

I have a while loop running for long time which uses different handles. While it is running I want to be able to press a button in GUI which then adds a number into handles. How is this possible?

 timeNow = datetime;
 handles.depth_stoptime = [handles.sort.depthtime; datestr(timeNow,'YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:ss')];
 guidata(hObject, handles);

This doesn't work, since the handles in the loop doesn't get this update.

Is the solution to use

 global depth_stoptime

instead?

Answer 1

[Toke Søltoft]

Well, I used global variables and it works fine. I tried with the pause, but it didnt help.

Answer 2

[Geoff Hayes]

Toke - you probably need to add a pause statement to you while loop so that it can be interrupted by the pressing of the pushbutton. See callback sequencing and interruption for details. If your pushbutton callback is something like

 function pushbutton1_Callback(hObject, eventdata, handles)

 timeNow = datetime;
 handles.depth_stoptime = [handles.sort.depthtime; datestr(timeNow,'YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:ss')];
 guidata(hObject, handles);

then the code in which you have the while loop will need to be something similar to

 while someConditionIsTrue

     % do stuff

     % pause to allow other functions to interrupt this one
     pause(0.01);

     % get the latest handles data
     handles = guidata(hObject);

 end

The above assumes that the while code is in some callback that has access to hObject so that we can get the latest version of handles (we have to do this else we will only be using the local copy of handles at the time at which this function was called and so won't get the updated depth_stoptime).