Set figure window to be always on top.

Changes the always-on-top window state.

Description

SETALWAYSONTOP(HFIG,TRUE) will make Matlab figure with handle HFIG to be on top of other windows in the OS even though it might not be in focus.

SETALWAYSONTOP(HFIG,FALSE) will put figure back to normal window state.

SETALWAYSONTOP(HFIG) is the same as SETALWAYSONTOP(HFIG,TRUE).

Second boolean argument TRUE/FALSE can also be exchanged to numerical 1/0.
    
Restrictions:
HFIG must have property value: Visible = on.
HFIG must have property value: WindowStyle = normal.
Swing components must be available in the current Matlab session.
    
Example:
    hFig = figure;
    setAlwaysOnTop(hFig,true); % figure is now on top of other windows

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; Set figures and scopes to be always on top
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.2 (R2006a)

[F Moisy]

Simple but very useful. well done.

[John D'Errico]

I was expecting to give this a good review. So I tried it out, only to see the following:

>> plot(1:5)
>> setAlwaysOnTop(gcf)

??? Error using ==> setAlwaysOnTop
First Arg. Must be a Figure-Handle

Error in ==> setAlwaysOnTop at 54
fJFrame.fFigureClient.getWindow.setAlwaysOnTop(bool);

I'm fairly confident that gcf is a figure handle. ;-)

>> ishandle(gcf)
ans =
     1

I tried the example shown by the author too:

>> h = figure;
>> setAlwaysOnTop(h,true)
??? Error using ==> setAlwaysOnTop
First Arg. Must be a Figure-Handle

Error in ==> setAlwaysOnTop at 54
fJFrame.fFigureClient.getWindow.setAlwaysOnTop(bool);

All testing was done in R2006b. If I have to hazard a guess, there is an undocumented requirement of Windoze to run this utility.

[Matthew Whitaker]

See setWindowOnTop
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=11684&objectType=FILE

for an implementation that has been tested with R14SP2 through R2006b

[Per-Anders Ekström]

Comment 1. Thank you.

Comment 2. I have not tested this utility using R2006b, if I had I would have written that under the MATLAB Release. Could be the problem since Mathworks might have modified their graphics code. For me the code works under both "Windoze" and OS X.

I find it very strange that you get caught in the 'fighandle' error check though. The error is only invoked if:
~ishandle(hFig) % this you have already tested.
length(hFig)~=1 % since figure handle is a scalar this cannot be the case.
~strcmp('figure',get(hFig,'Type')) % according to documentation, for figures, Type is always the string 'figure'.

What am I'm missing?

Comment 3. I had no idea that there existed a code that did this thing already, my bad. The "core" in your code does exactly the same thing as mine.

[Matthew Whitaker]

The trick that I found for setWindowOnTop was to do that Java calls inside awtinvoke which 'invokes the method on the AWT event thread'

This made it a lot more stable. I was not aware of the expose option for drawnow. learn something everyday!!

[Reid Pulley]

This function worked if I stepped through the code, but not running free - I kept getting this error:

??? Attempt to reference field of non-structure array.

Error in ==> setAlwaysOnTop at 54
fJFrame.fFigureClient.getWindow.setAlwaysOnTop(bool);

I inserted a slight pause in the code and it worked great.

pause( 0.1 );
fJFrame.fFigureClient.getWindow.setAlwaysOnTop(bool);

[Christophe Charbu]

Well done. Thank you.

I have tested on the (R2007b) (R2008b)
and it works good.

PS: In the release R2008b, a warning occur :
Warning: figure JavaFrame property will be obsoleted in a future release.