Removing uitable cell selection highlight

Hi,

I have a uitable that includes a checkboxes in column 1 and string-valued entries in column 2. Some of the entries may be "ghosted", which is faked by prepending HTML tags to change their font color to gray. A corresponding bitvector keeps track of the ghosted rows. Clicking in either column on a ghosted row is ignored, with an immediate return from the CellSelectionCallback routine.

This works OK except for one annoyance: When a ghosted string (column 2 of a ghosted row) is clicked, the blue cell selection highlight remains on after the return from the callback. A subsequent click in column 1 of the same row, will remove it, but that's not a good solution. Can anyone suggest a way to programmatically remove it ("deselect" the clicked cell)?

BTW, I just purchased Yair Altman's excellent book Undocumented Secrets of MATLAB-Java Programming, but this doesn't seem to be a covered topic.

Answer 1

[Yair Altman]

This is covered (briefly) at the bottom of page 169 of my book...

[Jim]

Yes, I see it now. Thanks.

Mathworks also gave me a pure Matlab work around to fix this, which is to set the Data property of the uitable to some temporary value, and then restore it to its original value prior to returning from the cell selection callback. The temporary value must be different from the original to force the deselection.

[telmo egues]

Hi, I've tried this solution and didn't work, how would you write the code of this?

Thanks in advance

[Jim]

This works for me. It's inside the uitable's CellSelectionCallback:

if any(ghostRows == clickedRow)  
  myTable = src.Data;
  temp = myTable;
  temp(end) = {'DUMMY'};
  src.Data = temp;
  src.Data = myTable;
  return
end

If I click on a ghosted row in the string-valued column, the focus highlight (dotted box around entry) still appears, but I find that much less objectionable than turning the entire cell background blue as happened before.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

You could try setting the uitable to 'enable' 'off', drawnow(), then 'enable' 'on' and drawnow()

[Jim]

Walter, Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately that doesn't work. I've also tried a plain drawnow() without toggling the enable property, and a figure() call. No joy so far. -Jim

[Jim Hokanson]

This accomplishes what I want, which is unlinking the keyboard from the cell. Now the up and down arrows don't navigate cells, which for my particular program was causing other problems. Note, you still have a visual indication of the cell being selected (gray box instead of blue), which in my case is OK. Ideally TMW would just provide a method to implement the actual desired feature! :/

Answer 3

[Jonghoon Kim]

function [] = DeselectCellinUItable()

%---------------------------------------------------------------

uif = uifigure();

uif.Units = 'normalized';

uif.Position = [0.10, 0.50, 0.80, 0.40];

%---------------------------------------------------------------

uit = uitable(uif);

uit.Units = 'normalized';

uit.Position = [0.10, 0.50, 0.80, 0.40];

uit.Data = cell2table(num2cell(rand(10,7)));

uit.RowName = 'numbered';

uit.ColumnEditable = true;

uit.SelectionType = 'cell';

uit.Multiselect = 'off';

uit.SelectionChangedFcn = @(src,event) DeselectUItable;

%---------------------------------------------------------------

function DeselectUItable

uit.Selection = [];

end

%---------------------------------------------------------------

end