How to reset the default values in a graphical user interface

Question

I'm creating a graphic interface (manually) and I would like to have a reset button which reset the default values.

I already code this

H.but(3) = uicontrol('Units','normalized', ...

    'BackgroundColor',[1 0.7 1], ...
    'Callback','MyFunction(''Reset'');', ...
    'FontSize',12, ...
    'Position',[0.04 0.54 0.1 0.05 ], ...
    'String','Reset');

case 'Reset'
clear all % Is not working and I think that isn't that I expect
set(findobj(H.fig,'style','edit', '-or','style','text'),'string','') % H is a global variable. This trial don't give the default value, it just clear certain boxes

Answer 1

I usually prefer to create a specific reset_gui function for my GUIs that resets all the relevant control properties (like checkbox states, strings in editable text boxes, etc.) to appropriate default values, as well as setting all relevant variable values to their defaults, clearing plots, etc..

If you'd prefer a generic option for resetting all UI control properties to their initial state, here's an example of one possible solution:

function example_reset_gui

  % Initialize GUI:
  hFigure = figure();
  uicontrol('Style', 'edit', 'Position', [20 100 100 25]);
  uicontrol('Style', 'edit', 'Position', [20 65 100 25]);
  uicontrol('Style', 'push', 'Position', [20 20 60 30], ...
            'String', 'Reset', 'Callback', @reset_fcn);
  drawnow

  % Collect default states:
  [defaultState{1:3}] = get_default_state(hFigure);

  % Nested reset function:
  function reset_fcn(~, ~)
    set(defaultState{:});
  end

end

% Local function:
function [hArray, propArray, valueArray] = get_default_state(hFigure)
  hArray = findall(hFigure, 'Type', 'uicontrol');
  propArray = fieldnames(set(hArray(1)));
  valueArray = get(hArray, propArray);
end

This creates a figure with 2 editable text boxes and a reset button. You can type whatever you want into the text boxes, and when you push the reset button it will clear them (i.e. set them to the default empty string they first contained).

The local function get_default_state will find all the uicontrol objects in the figure, then get all of their set-able properties (i.e. all properties that are not read-only), then get all the initial values for those properties. The three outputs are stored in the 1-by-3 cell array defaultState, which is accessible by the nested function reset_fcn. When the reset button is pressed, all of the set-able UI control properties are set to the values they had when first created.

It should be noted that any changes made to the Position property (such as due to resizing of the figure) could be undone by this approach. Using 'normalized' units would avoid this.