Undocumented Swing property number 239

December 4th, 2007

Working on an enhancement request to disable spinner buttons when the model returns null value (for either previous or next values), i stumbled across the following new undocumented property that can be set on UIManager in Mustang – “Spinner.disableOnBoundaryValues”

When you set it to Boolean.TRUE, some core look-and-feels (such as Metal in the screenshot below) will disable spinner buttons according to the model state. Note the down button of the first spinner that is disabled since the current shown value is the first value in the model (and there is no previous value to go to):

Spinner buttons

A quick search on Google reveals that this property is not documented anywhere except the source code for BasicSpinnerUI class, which begs the question – why add it at all if you’re not documenting it? Will it be supported in Dolphin and further, or is it just an internal implementation detail that can go away at any time?