pushprop

PUSHPROP is used to temporarily save and optionally set one or more properties of one or more Handle Graphics objects.

PUSHPROP is used in passages normally coded like this:

SavedProp = get(h, 'Property');
set(h, 'Property', newval);
% ... interact some more with object h
set(h, 'Property', SavedProp);

With PUSHPROP, the above segment can be written as

SavedProp = pushprop(h, 'Property', newval);
% ... interact some more with object h
SavedProp.pop();

Although it does save you one line of code, the real advantage is that the saved and restored property name(s) only need to be entered once, making the code easier to maintain and also makes the coder's intentions more transparent.

PUSHPROP closely mimics the syntax of SET, except for the output. Also, it behaves consistently for a structure array, in that it treats the elements in the array as individual setting for each handle. SET uses the last element of the struct for all objects.

Example:
% Set the current figure's background color to red for two seconds.
SavedColor=pushprop(gcf, 'Color', [1 0 0]);
pause(2);
SavedColor.pop();