Class Inheritance Browser

A tool for managing and organizing classes, with a simple interface and (optional) tree diagram.

Description

This tool searches a given directory and populates a browser window with pertinent information about each discovered class, including properties, methods, and superclasses. Other useful features include opening a class definition file from the browser window, opening a file to the line where a certain method is defined, and printing property help to the console.

Additionally, if the Bioinformatics Toolbox is installed, a tree diagram will be displayed that visualizes inheritance relationships between all Matlab classes found.

Originally written as a project for Engineering 177, Advanced Matlab Programming, Spring 2010, Professor Andrew Packard, University of California, Berkeley.

Acknowledgements

View Class Inheritance Hierarchy inspired this file.

This file inspired Matlab Class Inheritance Browser.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.9 (R2009b)
• Other requirements: The Bioinformatics Toolbox is necessary to enable tree diagram functionality.

[Andreas]

up to date versions of this toolbox can be found on github:

https://github.com/kotowicz/matlab-ClassInheritanceBrowser

Please submit your problems to github too, since I don't check fileexchange too often.

[Sander Aerts]

It could be a nice utility but it doesn't work on my computer (I run R2011b). I receive the following error:

unkown error:
The specified super-class 'cooler' contains a parse error or cannot be found on MATLAB's search path, possibly shadowed by another file with the same name.
Class Inheritance Analyzer/Browser

I happen to know that 'cooler' is a package directory and not a super class. Following the program flow I ended up in the iTree class where some invalid meta.class instance caused an error.

I hope you can fix it, the screenshots do look promissing.

[Jitka]

Thank you for this utility, but for me, iz doesn't work. As I try the example, I get a message "Error: Class not found. Please check if class name is correct or try again using full path to class.", but everything should be ok: h = classInheritance.browse('+inex');. When I tried to use the full path, the message was the same.

[Brad Stiritz]

Very helpful utility! Highly recommended! I launch this browser from a Matlab toolbar button.
Just a couple of minor notes :
(1) I commented-out browse.m lines 24-31 to suppress annoying error messages about bioinfo toolbox; maybe please wrap those in a conditional, if possible?
(2) Long identifier strings can easily get cut off & scrolling within the columns is no fun. Maybe please consider resizing window contents when window is resized?
Otherwise, great work! Thank you very much for this submission :)

[Kenneth]

Rather than use "ver('bioinfo')" I'd suggest using:
license('checkout', 'Bioinformatics Toolbox'). This is a special condition for those of us using network licenses. We may have the toolbox installed, but we can't get to a license.

[Andreas]

the latest version (Updated 12 Aug 2010) should also work without the Bioinformatics Toolbox (but won't show the tree diagram). Please post if you get any errors though.

[Riccardo]

Hi,

This sounds very useful.

Is there a way for it to work without the bioinformatic toolbox which I don't have?

[Andreas]