Plot order with two Y-axes?

I am creating a plot with a line plot on the left y-axis and a bar plot on the right y-axis. I am doing this using:

line1 = plot(x,y);
yyaxis right
bar1 = bar(x,z);

This results in the bar plot on top of the line. So I tried:

uistack(bar1,'bottom')

Which gives me the error:

Children may only be set to a permutation of itself

The issue seems to be that they are not plotted on the same axis. Because if I omit the line "yyaxis right" (so that the line and bar plot both use the left y-axis, then uistack(bar1,'bottom') works correctly.

Is there any way to specify which y-axis is on top? I tried to accomplish this using the following code, which did not work:

yyaxis right
axes2 = gca;
uistack(axes2,'bottom');

This did not return an error, but it also did not work.

Answer 1

[Ankitha Kollegal Arjun]

The issue seems to be with the 'yyaxis' command.

A possible workaround for this is using 'plotyy' instead of 'yyaxis'. However, please note that 'plotyy' will be deprecated soon. For the time being, this workaround should suffice.

Here is a sample code:

x=1:10;

y=x.^2;

z=x;

p = plotyy(x,y,x,z,'plot','bar');

line1 = p(1);

bar1 = p(2);

uistack(bar1,'bottom')

[Myself and Matlab]

Is the problem with yyaxis and uistack to be fixed?

[Daniel Murphy]

+1 to this - is there really no way to use yyaxis and display the left axis plot on top?

[Adam Danz]

Just a few corrections to the demo.

1. p (the 1st output to plotyy) is the 2 axis handles. To get the line object handes, use the 2nd and 3rd outputs.
2. The demo is correct to change the stack of the axes but axis 2 (on top by default) is transparent while axis 1 has a white background by default. So, after the stack change, you will not see axis 2 unless you change the transparency of axis 1.

A demo of this is provided here:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/489486-link-axes-with-different-y-scales#answer_400340

[Arthur Vieira]

+1 Indeed the right axis is usually of less importance and would sit better in the back. For now I will edit the *.svg later, before publishing the figures I'm producing.

Answer 2

[Thomas Speh]

No i don't think so.