Is there a way to tell uigetfile to start browsing in a folder other than the current one?

Sometimes I run uigetfile multiple times and the user will typically want to read in files from the same directory/folder each time. I'm looking for a way to tell uigetfile to resume browsing from the last folder visited in the previous call to uigetfile. I can easily obtain the path name of the last folder visited, but can't see how to tell uigetfile to resume from there, other than to CD to the folder, which is awkward for various reasons, and not the solution I prefer.

I'd like to be able to do similar things with uiputfile, etc... Any suggestions?

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Edit

uigetfile('*.m','select the m file','E:/matlab')

[Matt J]

This works well!

[David Borrego]

Hello,

Do you know how to make it work for a folder out of the .m folder domain?

[Matt J]

@David Borrego Not sure what you mean by the ".m folder domain". There is no limitation on the folder you specify in the 3rd argument to uigetfile().

Answer 2

[Jan]

CD is not really awkward in my opinion:

persistent lastFolder
if isempty(lastFolder)
  lastFolder = cd;
end

bakCD = cd;
cd(lastFolder);
[file, folder] = uigetfile('*.*', 'Choose a file');
cd(bakCD);
if ischar(folder)
  lastFolder = folder;
end
...

This opens automatically the last used folder, which is an intuitive behavior. Of course this would work with the method suggested by Azzi also.

[Matt J]

I guess it's not so terrible. It get's a little awkward IMO when you are calling uigetfile through a wrapper instead of calling it directly. Then you either have to pass lastFolder along to the wrapper with an extra argument, as below, or do extra work to extract it from arg1,arg2, etc...

 [file, folder] = wrapper(lastFolder,arg1,arg2,...);

 function [file, folder] = wrapper(lastFolder, varargin)

    backCD=cd;
    cd(lastFolder);

    [file, folder] = uigetfile(varargin{:});
    cd(backCD); 

 end