CODEWITHSUNDEEP
matlaboop
Tristan Thompson
Tristan Thompson

Reputation: 103

Get Object name as string MATLAB

I want to find a way to get the name of an instance of an object in MATLAB and return it within itself in MATLAB R2019b.

So in the Launcher Constructor define the instances like this

Properties
    TorqueViewComponent
    SpeedViewComponent
end

methods
    function obj = Launcher()
        TorqueViewComponent = GraphView(args...);
        SpeedViewComponent = GraphView(args...);
    end
end

and then within the graph view object constructor something like

function obj = GraphView(args...)
    if strcmp(object name, 'TorqueViewComponent')
        do some things;
    elseif strcmp(object name, 'SpeedViewComponent')
        do some other things;
    end
end

In essence I have multiple instances of the GraphView object, which I want to plot different sets of data based on the name of the instance.

If you have any questions let me know and I can go over the problem in a little more detail

Upvotes: 1

Views: 214

Answers (2)

Tasos Papastylianou
Tasos Papastylianou

Reputation: 22215

You really only have two options; either subclass Graphview to create specialised subclasses, or pass an extra input argument. There might be some hacky solution to allow you to somehow get the name from the caller workspace, but this is highly unlikely to improve readability and maintainability of your code.

Subclassing

E.g.

classdef TorqueGraphView < GraphView
   methods
      function obj = TorqueGraphView(varargin)
         obj@SuperClass(varargin);
         ...
      end
   end
end

In fact, if you don't really need to pass extra arguments to TorqueGraphView, you can take advantage of the fact that you can make an Implicit Call to Inherited Constructor

classdef TorqueGraphView < GraphView
    % ... no constructor, only Torque-specific methods here
end

Explicit input arguments

Otherwise, if you think this is overkill for such small adjustments, you really have to pass an argument to indicate this. If your main concern is 'messiness', you can consider packaging your arguments into a struct, which looks a bit more tidy. This might even help you nicely separate object-specific arguments from generic / option related arguments, e.g.

TorqueArgs = struct(                  ...
    'type'        ,   'torque'      , ...
    'initialvalue',   0             , ...
    'ylabel'      ,   'Torque [Nm]' , ...
    'plottitle'   ,   'Torque'        )

GraphOpts = struct (      ...
    'axescolor',   'k'  , ...
    'linewidth',   3,   , ...
    'grid'     ,   'on'   )

TorqueViewComponent = GraphView( TorqueArgs, GraphOpts );

Upvotes: 2

Wolfie
Wolfie

Reputation: 30047

You added in the comments that this was to influence things like the ylabel of the plot.

You could use inputname to get around this, but you'd have to split the function out, as the variable needs to be defined first.

function ylabelVarName( v )
    ylabel( inputname(1) )
end

Then

function obj = Launcher()
    TorqueViewComponent = GraphView(args...);
    ylabelVarName( TorqueViewComponent );
    SpeedViewComponent = GraphView(args...); 
    ylabelVarName( SpeedViewComponent );
end

You could probably make this part of the GraphView class, but I can't see how you'd get around doing it in two lines.

Really though, I think the correct answer is to just use an additional input argument for your GraphView function which specifies your preferences in terms of axis labels etc.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions