WindowButtonDownFcn conflicting with ButtonDownFcn

What I want to achieve is this:

user clicks on an axes: -Run CallbackA

user clicks somewhere else in the figure: -Run CallbackB

What I have done is to set the ButtonDownFcn (CallbackA) of axes, and the WindowButtonDownFcn (CallbackB) of the figure.

Now the thing is that whenever I click on an axes, it runs both Callbacks (both WindowButtonDownFcn and ButtonDownFcn are triggered).

Can I avoid this, and trigger only one of them?

Answer 1

[Jan]

You can insert an axes object spanning this whole figure as a background and use its ButtonDownFcn:

BGcolor = get(0, 'DefaultFigureColor');
BGaxes = axes('Units', 'normalized', 'Position', [0,0,1,1], ...
              'XTicks, [], 'YTicks', [], ...
              'Color', BGcolor, 'XColor', BGcolor, 'YColor', BGcolor, ...
              'ButtonDownFcn', 'disp(''Background'')');
DataAxes = axes('ButtonDownFcn', 'disp(''Data'')';

Answer 2

[Mark]

I was playing around with this recently and noticed that the ButtonDownFcn callback (not WindowButtonDownFcn) for a figure is only activated when the background is clicked. Try this:

 hFig = figure;
 hAx = axes;
 set(hFig, 'ButtonDownFcn', @(~,~) disp('clicked background'));
 set(hAx, 'ButtonDownFcn', @(~,~) disp('clicked axes'));

See documentation on figure properties:

"Button press callback function. Executes whenever you press a mouse button while the pointer is in the figure window, but not over a child object"