Our website uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience.
Accept
to the top
close form

Fill out the form in 2 simple steps below:

Your contact information:

Step 1
Congratulations! This is your promo code!

Desired license type:

Step 2
Team license
Enterprise license
** By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement
close form
Request our prices
New License
License Renewal
--Select currency--
USD
EUR
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
Free PVS‑Studio license for Microsoft MVP specialists
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
To get the licence for your open-source project, please fill out this form
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
I am interested to try it on the platforms:
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
check circle
Message submitted.

Your message has been sent. We will email you at


If you do not see the email in your inbox, please check if it is filtered to one of the following folders:

  • Promotion
  • Updates
  • Spam

Webinar: Evaluation - 05.12

>
>
>
V3096. Possible exception when serializ…
menu mobile close menu
Analyzer diagnostics
General Analysis (C++)
General Analysis (C#)
General Analysis (Java)
Micro-Optimizations (C++)
Diagnosis of 64-bit errors (Viva64, C++)
Customer specific requests (C++)
MISRA errors
AUTOSAR errors
OWASP errors (C++)
OWASP errors (C#)
Problems related to code analyzer
Additional information
toggle menu Contents

V3096. Possible exception when serializing type. [Serializable] attribute is missing.

May 10 2016

The analyzer detected a type that implements the 'ISerializable' interface but is not marked with the [Serializable] attribute. Attempting to serialize instances of this type will cause raising a 'SerializationException'. Implementation of the 'ISerializable' interface is not enough for the CLR to know at runtime that the type is serializable; it must be additionally marked with the [Serializable] attribute.

Consider the following example. Suppose we have a method to perform object serialization and deserialization:

static void Foo(MemoryStream ms, BinaryFormatter bf, C1 obj)
{
  bf.Serialize(ms, obj);
  ms.Position = 0;
  obj = (C1)bf.Deserialize(ms);
}

The 'C1' class is declared in the following way:

sealed class C1 : ISerializable
{
  public C1()
  { }

  private C1(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
  {
    field = (String)info.GetValue("field", typeof(String));
  }

  public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info,  
                            StreamingContext context)
  {
    info.AddValue("field", field, typeof(String));
  }

  private String field = "Some field";
}

When trying to serialize an instance of this type, a 'SerializationException' will be raised. To solve the issue, we must decorate this class with the [Serializable] attribute. Therefore, a correct class declaration should look like this:

[Serializable]
sealed class C1 : ISerializable
{
  public C1()
  { }

  private C1(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
  {
    field = (String)info.GetValue("field", typeof(String));
  }

  public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, 
                            StreamingContext context)
  {
    info.AddValue("field", field, typeof(String));
  }

  private String field = "Some field";
}

Note. This diagnostic has one additional parameter, which you can configure in the configuration file (*.pvsconfig). It has the following syntax:

//+V3096:CONF:{ IncludeBaseTypes: true }

With this parameter on, the analyzer examines not only how the 'ISerializable' interface is implemented by the class itself, but also how it is implemented by any of the base classes. This option is off by default.

To learn more about configuration files, see this page.