Catching a keyboard keypress in a MATLAB GUI - matlab

Question

I am using matlab and I want to have radio buttons, with some keys mapped to it.
The following code works for displaying radio button and taking values from the user. Can someone help me map keys 1 for Female and 2 for Male.
hgen_radio = uibuttongroup('visible','on','Units','pixels','Position',[1750 1045 170,50],'Title','Gender');
set(hgen_radio,'SelectionChangeFcn',#isMale_Callback);
ugen0 = uicontrol('Style','Radio','String','Male',...
'pos',[10 5 50 25],'parent',hgen_radio,'HandleVisibility','off');
ugen1 = uicontrol('Style','Radio','String','Female',...
'pos',[70 5 70 25],'parent',hgen_radio,'HandleVisibility','off');
set(hgen_radio,'SelectedObject',[]);
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In MATLAB, keypresses have to be caught by the figure containing the UICONTROLs, and then passed through. Here's one easy way to do this.
hgen_radio = uibuttongroup('visible','on','Units','Normalized','Position',[.2 .2 .2 .2],'Title','Gender');
set(hgen_radio,'SelectionChangeFcn',#(x,y)disp('Clicked!'));
ugen0 = uicontrol('Style','Radio','String','Male',...
'pos',[10 5 50 25],'parent',hgen_radio,'HandleVisibility','off');
ugen1 = uicontrol('Style','Radio','String','Female',...
'pos',[70 5 70 25],'parent',hgen_radio,'HandleVisibility','off');
set(hgen_radio,'SelectedObject',[]);
set(gcf,'keypressFcn',#(x,y)catchKey(hgen_radio,x,y))
where catchKey.m has something like:
function catchKey(hgen_radio,varargin)
switch varargin{2}.Key
case {'1','2'}
%to do: check if previous value was female, or male...
feval(get(hgen_radio,'SelectionChangeFcn'))
otherwise
%pass other keypresss through
end
See: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1450 for another example.
For applications of any complexity, you shouldn't pass handles around like I did above; instead store the values of all the handles in APPDATA using setappdata and getappdata. This significantly clarifies a lot of code. e.g. http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/setappdata.html