How to make waitbar 'always on top'/bring to front

Hi I have a GUI, which does some computation causing a waitbar to be displayed. This is fine. At some point, it brings up another waitbar, which causes the first waitbar to be 'pushed' to the back - i.e behind the main GUI. How can I keep the first waitbar 'always on top' - make sure that the main GUI is always kept to the back?

Answer 1

[Robert Cumming]

I thought this would be easy - but it took a bit more working out that I thought... I'm no expert in the Java side of matlab figures but this works for me (r2009b on Windows).

h=waitbar(0,'test','windowstyle', 'modal');
frames = java.awt.Frame.getFrames();
frames(end).setAlwaysOnTop(1); 
for i=1:5
  pause(0.5);
  if i == 2
    f = figure ( 'windowstyle', 'normal' );
    set ( f, 'position', [300 300 600 400] );
    plot ( sort(rand(10,1)), rand(10,1) );
  end
  waitbar(i/5,h);
end
close(f)
close(h)

[Markus Beschow]

Great solution! Also still works in r2020b on windows and probably should continue to work.

Does not disable interacting with matlab like the modal property does.

Answer 2

[Jiro Doke]

Try setting the WindowStyle of the waitbar to modal:

h = waitbar(1, 'test', 'WindowStyle', 'modal');

[James Ramm]

This is a fairly good quick fix, but then the GUI is no longer running in the background, which could potentially be a problem...