colormap doesn't work with bar plots in 2019a

I have been changing the colormap in bar charts for decades. It doesn't seem to work now with bar charts in 2019a.

Previously all I had to do to change the colormap in an existing bar chart to copper: colormap copper

Now it does nothing.

Answer 1

[Cris LaPierre]

Not sure if it's changed, but here's an example borrowed from the doc on bar.

y = [1 3 5; 3 2 7; 3 4 2];
b = bar(y,'FaceColor',"flat");
for k = 1:size(y,2)
    b(k).CData = k;
end

If I want to use a different colormap, I could do this.

colormap copper
y = [1 3 5; 3 2 7; 3 4 2];
b = bar(y,'FaceColor',"flat");
for k = 1:size(y,2)
    b(k).CData = k;
end

[Clay Fulcher]

Thanks Cris. That works and I'm back running again. It's now a much more complicated way to change the colormap in a bar plot. In the past, we didn't have to go back and change the CData for each bar. Kind of frustrating since previous scripts plotting with bar and colormap no longer work. Thanks again.

[KV]

I discovered this issue too today, working through some legacy code! This solution breaks a lot of older code that was used to produce plots.

Kind of silly and quite a pity now that it'll take a for loop with each bar command to change facecolors....

[Clay Fulcher]

Cris and KV,

This issue became so annoying that I finally wrote a function to quickly change the colormap of a bar graph. Here it is.

function barcolormap(axesobject,cmap)
%
% This function changes the colormap used with bar graphs.
% USAGE
% barcolormap(axesobject,cmap)
%
% INPUT
% axesobject - the axes object from an existing plot or subplot. Get this
%        from the existing axes with axesobject=gca;
% cmap - string containing the chosen colormap. Pre-defined colormaps are:
%        parula
%        turbo
%        hsv
%        hot
%        cool
%        spring
%        summer
%        autumn
%        winter
%        gray
%        bone
%        copper
%        pink
%        sky (since R2023a)
%        abyss (since R2023b)
%        jet
%        lines
%        colorcube
%        prism
%        flag
%        white
%
% EXAMPLE
%        bar(rand(6,3));
%        axesobject=gca;
%        cmap='copper';
%        barcolormap(axesobject,cmap);      % Change colormap to copper
%        barcolormap(axesobject,'winter');  % Change colormap to winter
%
% USAGE
% barcolormap(axesobject,cmap)
% 
h=axesobject;
set(h,'colormap',eval(cmap))
hbar=get(h,'children');
Lbar=length(hbar);
for i=1:Lbar
    set(hbar(i),'FaceColor','flat');
    hbar(i).CData=i;
end