clickableLegend

A legend with clickable strings that let you hide and show objects in a plot.

Description

clickableLegend is a wrapper around the LEGEND function that provides the added functionality to turn on and off (hide or show) a graphics object (line or patch) by clicking on its text label in the legend. Its usage is the same as the LEGEND function in MATLAB.

Notes:

1. You can group multiple lines into a single legend entry and toggle their visibility with a single click.

2. The DisplayedLines parameter lets you specify which lines should be displayed initially. This is useful if you have a large number of lines but want to start out with only a few shown.

3. If you save the figure and re-load it, the toggling functionality is not automatically re-enabled. To restore it, simply call clickableLegend with no arguments.

4. To prevent the axis from automatically scaling every time a line is turned on and off, issue the command: axis manual

Example 1:
z = peaks(100);
plot(z(:,26:5:50))
grid on;
axis manual;
clickableLegend({'Line1','Line2','Line3','Line4','Line5'}, 'Location', 'NorthWest');

Example 2:
f = plot([1:10;1:2:20]','x'); hold on;
g = plot(0:.1:10,sin([0:.1:10;0:.2:20]'),'r-');
h = plot(11:20,rand(5,10)*5,'b:');
clickableLegend([f;g;h], {'Line1','Line2','Line3'},...
  'groups', [1 1 2 2 3 3 3 3 3], 'displayedLines', [2 3]);

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)
• Other Files: clickableLegend.m, ; license.txt

[Thierry Dalon]

This is a feature I've requested as enhancement to TheMathworks for the base legend function.
Thank you for implementing it. I will give it a try.

[Thierry Dalon]

Excellent. It does what it sells. Very well coded as well.
Maybe the name of the function is a bit long.... I've changed it to ilegend.
Thanks.

[Riccardo Meldolesi]

Great functionality.

I learnt from the code too!

Well done

[Martin Richard]

Very good indeed. Congratulations!

[Richard]

Funny when I first saw this I thought: "nice but I don't really need it". Then today I was plotting a bunch of data and was wishing I had someone to "turn off" some of the lines. Just what I needed! Thanks for the great post.

[Hoi Wong]

Great idea! You saved my butt for my project.

[Jveer]

this is good stuff! how abt you get cracking on something similar for colorbar - i already have a name for it clickable colorbar ;)

[Jeff Preston]