Calculate actual size needed for a MATLAB uicontrol

Question

I'm trying to calculate the actual size needed for uicontrols in a GUI so the GUI can resize itself appropriately. My problem is that the Extent property of a uicontrol is only the text area, and I can't find a way to determine the size of the surrounding control (such as the down arrow in a popup or the margin of an edit control). Is there a way to get the size of the decorations on a control?

I saw this related question on MATLAB Answers, which looked like it ended with no solution as well.

Edit:

For example, I want to calculate how big this popup should be to avoid cutting off the contents:

uicontrol('style', 'popup', 'string', {'a long string'})

Extent only tells me how big "a long string" is, and I still don't know how big to make the popup. I want a way to determine how much extra space is needed on the user's display (without assuming which OS or font sizes they use).

Answer 1

You can use get(hObject,'extent') to find out how much space the string contained in the uicontrol takes up. You can see if this is larger than the uicontrol's position.