Question

Is there any way to generate serialVersionUID in Eclipse serially? By serially I want to mean that if one serializable class has serialVersionUID = 1L, then when I generate serialVersionUID of another class this will be serialVersionUID = 2L.

If I manually specify 1L, 2L, 3L and so on, will this can create any problem?

Eclipse gave an option to choose “Add generated serial version ID”, is this option safe to choose?

Answer 1

No, it won’t create any problem in any of your two circumstances:

• you can manually specify it incrementally
• you can let Eclipse assign them random generated values
• you can keep them all 1L for different classes

The purpose of the serial UID is to forbid serialization and deserialization of same classes in different versions, especially when there is not forward compatibility (eg. new version of the class cannot be serialized/unserialized by a previous definition).

This is a circumstance that occurs really rarely, especially when working with your own project which are not part of big frameworks that rely on serialization. So you can safely do whatever you want.

The situation in which you want to have different serials for the same class is when you are updating a class and you want to forbid the serialization of it with a previous declaration of the SAME class.