Question

I want to create a plot which has listeners to every item which is plotted. What I actually want to do is to create a 3D quiver plot, and whenever I click on the head of the arrow, I want to create another plot based on the ID of the arrow clicked.

Is this possible in Matlab?

I am open to exploring other options (which are easy to implement) in other programming languages.

Answer 1

Graphics handle objects have callbacks that you can use for this kind of thing.

ButtonDownFcn — Executes when you click the left mouse button while
the cursor is over the object or within a 5-pixel border around the
object.

You can also set the 'UserData' property of each graphics handle object, in your case to give it an ID.

Combine these two concepts to create the functionality that you want:

h = quiver(...); %# generate the graphics handle item;
set(h,'UserData',1,'ButtonDownFcn',@myCallback);

function myCallback(src,eventdata)
    clicked_item_id = get(src,'UserData'); %# get the ID of the clicked item
    figure; plot(data(ID)); %# obviously won't work as is, just for illustration
end