Question

I want to check whether some particular Java classes want to be commited. If so, I want to check if serialVersionUID is changed inside source of that particular class (new and old value).

How to do it? Any examples PLS.

Regards

Answer 1

You should be able to find plenty of examples on the web about setting up SVN hooks — here is the relevant chapter from the SVN book. Scroll down to Hook Scripts.

As to detecting serialVersionUID I share similar views to Andrzej Doyle: if you’re parsing the source code, there will likely be cases where you’ll incorrectly detect it. However, your source code in question may be simple enough that it works 99% of the time — and the ramifications of getting it wrong may not be too disastrous. Only you know the answer to that.

So, a really simple way to check for it (assuming a Linux/UNIX/Mac OS environment) is to use a shell script that uses grep to look for ‘serialVersionUID’. However, I can immediately think of a way this could detect a false positive: if an inner class declares it, a simple grep would detect it for the containing class (since we’re not parsing the file, we have no knowledge of the actual class structure inside).