Upcoming MATLAB release supports autoupdating legend

[erikhuizinga]

MATLAB has released R2017a Prerelease to some users. In the release notes on page 1-3 under Graphics, it is mentioned the legend function now supports the following behaviour.

Create legends that update when data is added to or removed from the axes

This is partially what legtools is intended for, so legtools could be updated to remain compatible with this new functionality (e.g. make use of it?) while retaining support for older MATLAB versions.

[sco1]

Thanks for the heads up, this was something I noticed as well going through the prerelease notes.

With AutoUpdate enabled:

• legtools.append no longer works, MATLAB ignores the extra legend entry since it's added its own
• legtools.permute no longer works
• legtools.remove no longer works
• legtools.adddummy still functions, but the internal legtools.append call has the same issue as above

Yay!

Simply toggling AutoUpdate doesn't work with the current implementation, the extra entries are removed/added once it's turned back on. There's still a little bit of time until R2017a is officially released so some options will be explored to hopefully resolve the issues.

[sco1]

The recently published Undocumented MATLAB article may have yielded a more reliable approach to manipulating the legend entries to unbreak everything that was broken in R2017a.

hLegend.EntryContainer.NodeChildren seems to provide similar functionality to hLegend.PlotChildren, so there's a chance that legends in newer versions of MATLAB respect changes to this where it stopped respecting changes to PlotChildren.

I'll try to investigate over the weekend or early next week.

[sco1]

While the article doesn't seem to help like I was hoping it would, I did find an unrelated approach that seems to easily restore functionality to append and adddummy.