You manipulate Stateflow® API objects by changing their properties or calling their methods.
Properties correspond to values that you normally set for an object through the
Stateflow Editor. For example, you can change the position of a state by changing
the Position property of the corresponding State
object:
st.Position = [10 20 100 80];
Methods provide services that are normally provided by the Stateflow Editor. For example, you can delete a transition in a chart by calling the
delete method of the corresponding
Transition
object:
tr.delete;
The names of all API properties and methods use camel case. If a name consists of two or more concatenated words, the words following the first word are capitalized.
To access the properties and methods of an object, use dot notation. Enter a
handle for the object followed by a period (.) and the name
of the property or method. For example, to see the value of the
StateMachineType property for the
Chart object ch,
enter:
ch.StateMachineType
To open the Chart properties dialog box, call the dialog method of the
Chart
object:
ch.dialog
To access the subproperties of an API property, you can nest multiple property
names in a single expression that uses dot notation. For example, you can set an
entry breakpoint on a chart by changing the subproperty
Debug.Breakpoints.OnEntry of the corresponding
Chart
object:
ch.Debug.Breakpoints.OnEntry = true;
When a property or method returns a handle to another API object, you can also
access the properties and methods for the second object by using nested dot
notation. For example, the Machine property of a
Chart returns a handle to the Stateflow machine that contains the corresponding chart. To access the
Name property of this Machine object,
enter the
expression:
machineName = ch.Machine.Name;
Similarly, the defaultTransitions method
returns a vector of handles to the default transitions in the chart. If the
chart contains only one default transition, you can retrieve its label by
entering:
label = ch.defaultTransitions.LabelString;
If the chart contains more than one default transition, you must first store the default transitions and then use an array index to retrieve each label:
transitions = ch.defaultTransitions; label1 = transitions(1).LabelString; label2 = transitions(2).LabelString;
As an alternative to dot notation, you can call the methods of API objects by
using standard function-call notation. For example, you can call the dialog method for a
Chart object ch by using one of these
commands:
ch.dialog % dot notation dialog(ch) % function-call notation
You can access the properties of an API object directly or by calling the
get method. For example, you
obtain the description for the Chart object
ch with one of these
commands:
description = ch.Description; % direct access description = ch.get('Description'); % get method -- dot notation description = get(ch,'Description'); % get method -- function-call notation
Similarly, you can change the value of a property directly or by calling the
set method. For example, you
change the description of the Chart object
ch with one of these
commands:
ch.Description = 'Half-wave rectifier.'; % direct access ch.set('Description','Half-wave rectifier.'); % set method -- dot notation set(ch,'Description','Half-wave rectifier.'); % set method -- function-call notation
Use the get and set methods to access or
modify a property for every object in an array. For example, these commands
return a cell array with the names of each chart in the array of
Chart objects
chartArray:
names = chartArray.get('Name'); % dot notation names = get(chartArray,'Name'); % function-call notation
To display information about API properties, you can use the help, get, and classhandle methods.
The help method displays the name
and a short description of each property of an
object.
ch.help
The get method displays a list of the names and values of the
properties of an
object.
ch.get
You can also use get to display the values of a subproperty
of an object. For example, to see the values of the subproperties of the
StateFont property of the Chart object
ch,
enter:
ch.StateFont.get
You can display other information about the properties of an object by using a
combination of the get and classhandle
methods. For example, this command displays a list of property names and data
types of a Chart
object:
ch.classhandle.Properties.get({'Name','DataType'})To see the fields that you can use with this syntax, enter:
ch.classhandle.Properties.get
Some properties do not have descriptions. When a property is sufficiently descriptive, the corresponding description is an empty character vector. For more information on these properties, see Properties and Methods Sorted by Stateflow Object.
Many API properties accept a limited number of possible values. To display a
list of acceptable values for a property, call the set method. For example, this
command displays the enumerated values allowed for the
Decomposition property of a Chart
object:
decompositionValues = ch.set('Decomposition')The methods method displays a list
of the methods of an
object.
ch.methods
You can also use a combination of the get and
classhandle methods to list the names of the methods for an
object:
ch.classhandle.Methods.get('Name')The methods method lists some internal methods that are
not documented. For a list of all documented methods, see Properties and Methods Sorted by Stateflow Object.
classhandle | get | help | methods | set