Structable

The STRUCTABLE class can be used to convert instantiated MATLAB classes to structs. In practice, this means converting the object's properties into identically-named fields of a struct with "flattened" values. For example, if a property contains a function handle, it will be converted to a string. If a property contains an object and that object inherits STRUCTABLE, it will be converted to struct and saved; otherwise, it will be passed over with a warning message.
STRUCTABLEHIERARCHY uses method overloading to retrieve class-specific information from any inherited classes. In this way, a single call to TOSTRUCT on the instantiated object will ripple through the entire hierarchy to produce a single converted struct.

The primary reason to perform this conversion is to save a "safe" representation of an object into a MAT file. Whereas a struct is a basic MATLAB variable type and struct variables can be loaded without dependency into any MATLAB environment, loading objects in MATLAB requires the defining class to be available on the path. Furthermore, if the class is not identical to the saved object's class definition, MATLAB will generate warnings, or worse.

The reason for using these classes for struct conversion is to provide added functionality where needed. The MATLAB builtin STRUCT method can be used to convert simple objects to structs, but it does not provide enough functionality for complicated class hierarchies.