serialVersionUID question

[Abhimanyu Kumar]

Hi,
I came to know that " The identifier that is part of all classes is maintained in a field called serialVersionUID."
But I am not able to access this field directly (say through a print statement, like System.out.println(serialVersionUID); ). So where is this value stored ? Also, i didnt find it in the class file when i opened it with decompiler.

Thanks in advance.

Abhimanyu.

[William Brogden]

According to the documentation I found, if you do not define a static final long serialVersionUID in your Serializable class, the ObjectOutputStream will compute one. The purpose being to avoid incompatible versions of a class being created by object serialization.
Bill

[Mihai Radulescu]

Hallo

I got a similar problem with this (but with an other flavor), the non static inner classes can not be serializated (as long the content class is not serializable). The explication was that a non static inner can not have a static member and if the content class is serializable its serialUID member can be access by the inner class.

I hope I was right ? What you think ?

[Abhimanyu Kumar]

Originally posted by Mihai Radulescu:
Hallo
The explication was that a non static inner can not have a static member.

Just one sidenote. Non static inner class can have static final variables (as they are constants). For ex.

class Outer {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(new Outer().new Inner().i);
System.out.println(Inner.i);
}
   class Inner {
      public static final int i = 3;
 
   }
}

-Abhimanyu.

[Mihai Radulescu]

Yeep It seamns that you have right Abhimanyu, a inner calss can have constants (final static). Good point!