How to deselect cells in uitable / how to disable cell selection highlighting?

Question

I created the following uitable:

actually every single row is an indpendent uitable, so the figure shown contains 5 uitables besides the header. Why I'm doing that was the issue of my last question, resulting in the shown table. Fully executable code you can find in the answer here (or a minimal example below). Solutions using a general GUI are also there, but it would blow up the code too much, and actually it just seems to be a kind of bug.

It can be seen that everytime I jump to the next row, therefore to another uitable, the last selection remains highlighted, which looks stupid, though it doesn't matter for the functionality.

There is the 'SelectionHighlight' property for uitables, sounds like a solution, but it is not changing anything. I used it as following:

set(src,'SelectionHighlight','off')  %where src is the handle of the current uitable

at various places: at the end of a 'CellSelectionCallback', at the end of a 'CellEditCallback' and as global property. But everytime the last cell remains selected. Actually I don't need selection at all.

How can I disable the whole selection or selection highlighting property for all my uitables?

How do I have to use this property, that it has an effect?

Alternatively: how can I change the "highlighting" color (and therefore text-color) so the highlighting is just not visible anymore?

Apparently this issue appears also in other contexts.

---

I created a minimum executable example, where one can select a number between 1 and 3 in every row.

function minimalTable 

%basic properties
line_height = 21.32;
table_height = 3*line_height;
lh = line_height/table_height;

h = figure('Position',[200 100 202 table_height],'numbertitle','off','MenuBar','none');

% addrow(figurehandle,number of row, percentage lineheight)
% every function call creates a new row, later dynamically
addRow(h,1,lh);
addRow(h,2,lh);
addRow(h,3,lh);
end

function modifySelection(src,~)
set(src,'SelectionHighlight','off')
waitfor(src)
end

function [th] = addRow(fh,k,lhp)
selector = { '1'; '2' ; '3' };
defaultData  =  {'select number...'};
columnformat =  {  {selector{:}}   };
columneditable =  true;

th = uitable(fh,'Units','normalized','Position',[0 1-k*lhp 1 lhp],...
              'Data', defaultData,... 
              'ColumnName', [],...
              'ColumnWidth', {200},...
              'ColumnEditable', columneditable,...
              'ColumnFormat', columnformat,...  
              'RowName',[],...
              'SelectionHighlight','off',...
              'CellEditCallback',@modifySelection);
end

results in:

Answer 1

After some deeper research I found out, that the Matlab Support comes out with the following solution:

%overwrite data with a dummy and restore the old data afterwards, to force deselection
function modifySelection(src,~)
 ...
temp = get(src,'Data')
set(src,'Data',{ 'dummy' });
set(src,'Data', temp );

end

Doing this the blue highlighting is gone, BUT the dotted line around the last selected cell remains! But I found a solution resolving this, which also makes the first part dispensable.

function modifySelection(src,evt)
 ...
fh = get(src,'parent');    % get parent figure handle
copyobj(src,fh);           % copy uitable to parent figure
delete(src);               % delete current uitable

end

Which results in the desired behaviour:

Drawback of the second solution: it lags a little (probably just on slow machines), because of the creation of a new object.

Answer 2

Allright, I found a solution for deselecting cells:

First of all, this requires some Java. But dont worry, it will still look like Matlab :)

1. You will need the script findjobj by Yair Altman: TMW File-Exchange: findjobj

2. You need the handle of your table, lets call it mtable. Then you need the underlying Java-table and do some stuff to get the right objects and set some properties. You can do this by:

jscroll=findjobj(mtable);
h=jscroll.getComponents;
viewport=h(1);
a=viewport.getComponents;
jtable=a(1); %com.mathworks.hg.peer.ui.UITablePeer
jtable.setRowSelectionAllowed(0);
jtable.setColumnSelectionAllowed(0);

3. Now the more tricky part (at least it was for me): If you have some Callback for CellSelectionChanged, but you dont want to excecute this now, you have to turn it off temporary:

set(mtable, 'CellSelectionCallback', []);

Now you can change the selection by:

jtable.changeSelection(row-1,col-1, false, false);
%Java-> zero ^= one <-Matlab

And now, I was expecting, when setting the CellSelectionCallback back to its original function, everything would be fine. Nope, it was excecuting the Callback. I still dont know the exact reason, but it seems to me, that calling jtable.changeSelection() the selection changes and then is calling the specified Callback, but the caller function is not waiting while this process is running. So what I tried (and I dont know if this is the best way to do it, but it is working very well) is to just pause for a second and then set the Callabck back:

pause(1)
set(mtable, 'CellSelectionCallback', @myOriginalFunction);

4. Now just one more thing: My purpose was just to change the selection to some other cell. Yours is to deselect. I dont know anything about the Java components, but I succeeded by just setting the row/column parameter to -1:

jtable.changeSelection(-1,-1, false, false);

Finally I managed to solve this problem by using many things explained on undocumentedmatlab.com and other posts. I am not sure if all the lines are necessary to call. Note, that this will only be available for the documented Matlab-uitable which appears first in Version 2008 (a or b, I'm not sure about that).

EDIT there are a lot of other functions/parameters etc. you can use, that are undocumented. Just to see what is possible, you can take a look with the autocomplete. Just use it on the jtable. and Tab will display them. For a documentation on those elements you should probably search for a Java-doc.

Just a small "dynamic" minimal example (wait 3 seconds to see a change ;-) ):

function startUitable()
xDat=ones(5,3);
h=figure('Tag','TestFigure');
mtable=uitable('Tag','TestUITABLE');
rowField=uicontrol('units','normalized','Style','edit','Position',[0.4 0.9 0.1 0.1],'parent',h,'Tag','rowField');
colField=uicontrol('units','normalized','Style','edit','Position',[0.6 0.9 0.1 0.1],'parent',h,'Tag','colField');
set(mtable, 'Units','normalized','Position',...
[0.01 0.01 0.8 0.8], 'Data', xDat,...
'ColumnEditable', [false, false,false],...
'ColumnWidth', 'auto')
myButton=uicontrol('units','normalized','Style','pushbutton','parent',h,'Position',[0.04 0.9 0.3 0.1],'String','change Selection')
set(myButton,'Callback',@changeSelection)
end

function  changeSelection(~,~,~)

mtable=findobj('Tag','TestUITABLE');
jscroll=findjobj(mtable);
h=jscroll.getComponents;
viewport=h(1);
a=viewport.getComponents;
jtable=a(1); %com.mathworks.hg.peer.ui.UITablePeer
%     jtable.setRowSelectionAllowed(0);
%     jtable.setColumnSelectionAllowed(0);
row=str2num(get(findobj('Tag','rowField'),'String'));
col=str2num(get(findobj('Tag','colField'),'String'));
jtable.changeSelection(row-1,col-1, false, false);
end