Question

When I open MATLAB, it defaults to open to /home/myUser. Whenever I open a file interactively (say I run Simulink and click “Open…”) the dialog will start in /home/myUser. Then I might go into /home/myUser/myDir1/myDir2/ before clicking on myModel.mdl.

If I open a different Simulink file with the “Open…” dialog again, it’ll kick me back to /home/myUser. Note that this is regardless of file, I’m just using Simulink as an example. I would like to keep it in /home/myUser/myDir1/myDir2, meaning I should be in the same directory as the last file I just opened (or saved).

Programatically, I would set up a callback to cd into whatever directory the file I chose was in after selecting the file using uigetfile. Is this possible to do just with MATLAB’s own “Open” or “Save As” commands?

Answer 1

There is a wrapper for uigetfile that remembers the last director on the file exchange. You can get wrappers for the other file dialogs as well from the same author.

EDIT

How to overload the built-in uigetdir etc.

(1) Rename uigetdir2 to uigetdir, and make sure it’s in a path that has precedence over the path for the built-in function (this should be the case by default).

(2) Use BUILTIN to ensure that the new function doesn’t call itself.

(2) Since uigetdir is implemented as a .m-file, as opposed to being compiled (like sum), the builtin command doesn’t work for it. Thus, open uigetdir, find the private function uigetdir_helper (which is private, so we can’t call it), and finally uncover the java method (that turns out to have changed from R2011a to R2011b. Yay.). This allows us to finally overload uigetdir at the cost of having to parse the input ourselves.

Here’s lines 37 to 67 from the modified uigetdir

%% Check passed arguments and load saved directory
% if start path is specified and not empty call uigetdir with arguments
% from user, if no arguments are passed or start path is empty load saved
% directory from mat file

% parse inputs
parserObj = inputParser;
parserObj.FunctionName = 'uigetdir';
parserObj.addOptional('startPath',[],@(x)exist(x,'dir'));
parserObj.addOptional('dialogTitle','Please choose directory',@ischar);

parserObj.parse(varargin{:});
inputList = parserObj.Results;


% create directory dialog instance - this has changed from 2011a to 2011b
if verLessThan('matlab','7.13')
    dirdlg = UiDialog.UiDirDialog();
else
    dirdlg = matlab.ui.internal.dialog.FolderChooser();
end
dirdlg.InitialPathName = inputList.startPath;
dirdlg.Title = inputList.dialogTitle;


if nargin > 0 && ~isempty(inputList.startPath)
    % call dirdlg instead of uigetdir to avoid infinite recursion
     dirdlg.show();

    % if dirname empty, return 0 for uigetdir.
    directory_name = dirdlg.SelectedFolder;
else
    % set default dialog open directory to the present working directory
    lastDir = pwd;
    % load last data directory
    if exist(lastDirMat, 'file') ~= 0
        % lastDirMat mat file exists, load it
        load('-mat', lastDirMat)
        % check if lastDataDir variable exists and contains a valid path
        if (exist('lastUsedDir', 'var') == 1) && ...
                (exist(lastUsedDir, 'dir') == 7)
            % set default dialog open directory
            lastDir = lastUsedDir;
        end
    end

    dirdlg.InitialPathName = lastDir;

    % call dirdlg instead of uigetdir to avoid infinite recursion
     dirdlg.show();

    % if dirname empty, return 0 for uigetdir.
    directory_name = dirdlg.SelectedFolder;

end