Setting class property types

When I wrote about the undocumented aspects of classdef properties half a year ago, I did not expect to learn of another major undocumented aspect in Matlab’s class-object system. last month I discovered the additional undocumented classdef Description and DetailedDescription attributes, and updated that article accordingly. But a few days ago I was pleasantly surprised to read Amro’s comment about an entirely new and undocumented aspect of Matlab MCOS classes.

Amro is a top contributor on StackOverflow, where he frequently answers questions before I even get any subscription notification about them… His answers are generally characterized by a deep technical understanding of Matlab, and I’ve learned quite a lot from him in the past few years. This time was no different.

In a nutshell, Amro found an undocumented way to specify a class object property’s type, in such a way that would prevent accidental setting to an incompatible value. For example, if we have a class with properties Width and Height, we probably want to restrict their possible values to numbers, to prevent setting a string or struct value.

In UDD classes, we can do this easily by setting the property’s DataType meta-property. An easy way to do this is by setting the second argument of the schema.prop function. A detailed explanation was provided here.

We can still do this today, since UDD classes are still supported, side-by-side with the newer MCOS classes. Unfortunately, MCOS does not provide a documented way of specifying the property type as in UDD.

One simple way to prevent unintentional MCOS property updates is to override the property’s set method. In fact, this was the solution of Jonas, another StackOverflow heavyweight:

classdef myClass
   properties
      myProperty = uint16(23); %# specify default value using correct type
   end
   methods
      function obj = set.myProperty(obj,val)
         if ~isa(val,'uint16')
            error('only uint16 values allowed')
         end
         %# assign the value
         obj.myProperty = val;
      end
   end
end

But it turns out that there’s a much cleaner and simpler solution, provided by Amro:

classdef Packet
    properties
        HeaderLength@uint16
        PayloadLength@uint16 = uint16(0);
        PacketType@char
    end
end

As Amro notes, if you try to set a property with the wrong type, you get an error:

>> p = Packet;
>> p.PacketType = 'tcp';  % ok
>> p.HeaderLength = 100;  % not ok - should be a uint16
While setting the 'HeaderLength' property of Packet:
Value must be 'uint16'.

This syntax apparently supports all primitive types (char, int32, double, struct, cell etc.), in addition to any user-defined ones (just use any class name).

Note that setting the type as above seems to override any set method that may have been specified for the property.

Amro came across this syntax in an internal class in R2013a (toolboxdir(‘matlab’)/graphics/+graphics/+internal/+figfile/@FigFile/FigFile.m), but it also worked in R2012a, and probably older versions as well…

I admit there’s not much original work here by me – it’s basically all by Amro (and Donn Shull for the UDD part). But I thought it’s important enough to bring to the attention of the community.

I love to discover such undocumented treasures by digging in Matlab’s function. If you ever discover other such buried treasures, please do let me know by email or a comment.

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