Pass Panel components to function with App Designer

Hi folks,

I wonder if there's a way to pass the items of a panel in App Designer somehow like a struct.

Let's say I have a simple GUI with 3 spinners on a panel as shown above. Now I for example press a button which calls a function:

xy = myFunction(app.Panel);

What I want to do in the function is something like:

function xy = myFunction(Panel)
    xy.a = Panel.Spinner.Value;
    xy.b = Panel.Spinner2.Value;
    xy.c = Panel.Spinner3.Value;
end

Is this possible?

Or do I have to pass every single value to my function?

I know I could do something like

xy = myFunction(app);

But I don't want to share the whole app data with my function. And in RL my panel not only contains 3 items.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

[Mario Malic]

Hello,

Yes, it's possible and what you posted should be working.

xy = myFunction(app.Panel);

If you inspect Panel component, the Spinner components will be in Children property of the Panel component. You can access each Spinner value by indexing into Children property. But, how does one know which dropdown comes first, is it the same order as in Component Browser section or the other, I am leaving you to check. You can also use the Tag property to distinguish between each Spinner.

app.Panel.Children(1).Value

If you want to use the values from dropdowns to do some calculations without changing panel options, maybe you should consider creating a struct that you will send to the function.

spinnerValues = struct('a', app.Spinner.Value, 'b', app.Spinner2.Value, 'c', app.Spinner3.Value)
xy = myFunction(spinnerValues);

Answer 2

[Avratanu Biswas]

Hi ,

If I understood your question correctly, it is possible to pass all the components within an app ( as long as it is defined as a global property) . But you need to assign each values of the spinner separately in your case .

% for example 
function xy = myFunction(app)
        xy.a = app.Spinner.Value
        xy.b = app.Spinner2.Value
        xy.c = app.Spinner3.Value
end

[Dominik Müller]

This is exactly what I meant by

xy = myFunction(app);

But this is not what I want to do.

I only want the component's values placed on the panel to be passed to my function. And not all the app data.