How to identify ui component classes that other ui components can be children of

I am trying to identify ui components like uipanels, uigridlayouts, uitabs, etc., that may contain other ui components as children.

Right now I'm just testing if the class name contains "matlab.ui.container" or is a figure:

contains(class(o),'matlab.ui.container') || isa(o,'matlab.ui.Figure') ...

Is there a better way?

[J. Alex Lee]

i think my need for this was largely obsoleted by the R2020b+ feature of CompontentContainer, which manages for you the constructor/setup syntax and input parsing.

Answer 1

[Monika Phadnis]

You can also use the 'Children' property of UI components.

This property contains list of child component objects if any, it is empty otherwise.

For example, you can refer to this documentation for 'uifigure' properties and 'uipanel' properties :

• https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.ui.figureappd-properties.html#bu4i700-1-Children
• https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.ui.container.panelappd-properties.html#bub8wap-1-Children

You can check if this property is empty or has some components under it.

[J. Alex Lee]

Looks like this could be it, thanks! I didn't realize that components that can't have Children don't have that property, nor that querying Children would return an empty graphics handle if empty, rather than just empty...these 2 together should be enough to make a reasonably robust check!