Find Items that are Not [Serializable]

Question

I was wondering if anyone knows of a quick way or if anyone has written a reflection tool to tell which objects in a solution are not marked as serializable. I'm switching a site over to a StateServer and i need to have all objects marked as serializable. I don't want to miss any.

Also, second part do enums have to be serializable?

The website is an ASP.NET 1.1 site built with VS 2003

Answer 1

Enum require to be serializable.

To find out what is not serializable, I do have unit test to these object that simply call a method to know if it's serializable. This method try to serialize, if fail, the object is not...

    public static Stream serialize<T>(T objectToSerialize)
    {
        MemoryStream mem = new MemoryStream();
        BinaryFormatter b = new BinaryFormatter();
        b.Serialize(mem, objectToSerialize);
        return mem;
    }

In you unittest you need to call serialize(objectToCheck); if not serizlisable, an exception will raise.

Answer 2

Enums are inherently serialisable.

I wrote this helper for getting attributes off objects, you could add a line to the top of your application that calls the following code:

var assemblies = GetTheAssembliesFromYourApp();
foreach (var assembly in assemblies)
{
    var types = assembly.GetTypes ();
    foreach (var type in types)
    {
        if (AttributeHelper.GetAttrbiute<Serializable> (type) == null)
        {
            // Log somewhere - this type isn't serialisable...
        }
    }
}


static class AttributeHelper
{
 #region Static public methods

 #region GetAttribute

 static public T GetAttribute<T> (object obj)
  where T : Attribute
 {
  if (obj == null)
   throw new ArgumentNullException ("obj");

                    // If the object is a member info then we can use it, otherwise it's an instance of 'something' so get it's type...
  var member = (obj is System.Reflection.MemberInfo) ? (System.Reflection.MemberInfo)obj : obj.GetType ();

  return GetAttributeImpl<T> (member);
 }

 #endregion GetAttribute

 #endregion Static public methods

 #region Static methods

 #region GetAttributeImpl

 static T GetAttributeImpl<T> (System.Reflection.MemberInfo member)
  where T : Attribute
 {
  var attribs = member.GetCustomAttributes (typeof (T), false);
  if (attribs == null || attribs.Length == 0)
   return null;

  return attribs[0] as T;
 }

 #endregion GetAttributeImpl

 #endregion Static methods
}