What is a serialVersionUID and why should I use it

Question

Eclipse issues warnings when a serialVersionUID is missing        The serializable class Foo does not declare a static final   serialVersionUID field of type long   What is serialVersionUID and why is it important   Please show an example where missing serialVersionUID will cause a problem

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Firstly to answer your question  when we don t declare SerialVersionUID in our class  Java runtime generates it for us  but that process is sensitive to many class meta data including number of fields  type of fields  access modifier of fields  interface implemented by class etc  Therefore it is recommended to declare it ourselves and Eclipse is warning you about the same   Serialization  We often work with important objects whose state  data in the variables of the object  is so important that we can not risk to lose it due to power system failures  or  network failures in case of sending the object state to other machine  The solution for this problem is named  Persistence  which simply means persisting  holding saving  the data  Serialization is one of many other ways to achieve persistence  by saving data to disk memory   When saving the state of the object  it is important to create an identity for the object  to be able to properly read it back  de-serialization   This unique identification is ID is SerialVersionUID

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You can tell Eclipse to ignore these serialVersionUID  warnings      Window   Preferences   Java   Compiler   Errors   Warnings   Potential Programming Problems   In case you didn t know  there are a lot of other warnings you can enable in this section  or even have some reported as errors   many are very useful    Potential Programming Problems  Possible accidental boolean assignment Potential Programming Problems  Null pointer access Unnecessary code  Local variable is never read Unnecessary code  Redundant null check Unnecessary code  Unnecessary cast or  instanceof    and many more

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Each time an object is serialized the object is stamped with a version ID number for the object s class This ID is called serialVersionUID and it is computed based on information about the class structure  Suppose you made an Employee class and it has version id  333  assigned by JVM  Now when you will serialize the object of that class  Suppose Employee object   JVM will assign UID to it as  333   Consider a situation - in the future you need to edit or change your class and in that case when you modify it  JVM will assign it a new UID  Suppose  444   Now when you try to deserialize the employee object  JVM will compare serialized object s  Employee object  version ID  333  with that of the class i e  444 Since it was changed   On comparison JVM will find both version UID are different and hence Deserialization will fail  Hence if serialVersionID for each class is defined by programmer itself  It will be same even if the class is evolved in future and hence JVM will always find that class is compatible with serialized object even though the class is changed  For more Info you can refer chapter 14 of HEAD FIRST JAVA

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First I need to explain what serialization is  Serialization allows to convert an object to a stream  for sending that object over the network OR Save to file OR save into DB for letter usage  There are some rules for serialization   An object is serializable only if its class or its superclass implements the Serializable interface  An object is serializable  itself implements the Serializable interface  even if its superclass is not  However  the first superclass in the hierarchy of the serializable class  that does not implements Serializable interface  MUST have a no-arg constructor  If this is violated  readObject   will produce a java io InvalidClassException in runtime  All primitive types are serializable   Transient fields  with transient modifier  are NOT serialized   i e   not saved or restored   A class that implements Serializable must mark transient fields of classes that do not support serialization  e g   a file stream    Static fields  with static modifier  are not serialized    When Object is serialized  Java Runtime associates the serial version number aka  the serialVersionID  Where we need serialVersionID  During the deserialization to verify that sender and receiver are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver loaded the class with a different serialVersionID then deserialization will end with InvalidClassCastException  A serializable class can declare its own serialVersionUID explicitly by declaring a field named serialVersionUID that must be static  final  and of type long  Let s try this with an example  import java io Serializable   public class Employee implements Serializable       private static final long serialVersionUID   1L      private String empname      private byte empage       public String getEmpName             return name             public void setEmpName String empname            this empname   empname             public byte getEmpAge             return empage             public void setEmpAge byte empage            this empage   empage             public String whoIsThis             return getEmpName      quot  is  quot    getEmpAge      quot years old quot            Create Serialize Object import java io FileOutputStream  import java io IOException  import java io ObjectOutputStream   public class Writer       public static void main String   args  throws IOException           Employee employee   new Employee            employee setEmpName  quot Jagdish quot            employee setEmpAge  byte  30            FileOutputStream fout   new                 FileOutputStream  quot  users Jagdish vala employee obj quot            ObjectOutputStream oos   new ObjectOutputStream fout           oos writeObject employee           oos close            System out println  quot Process complete quot             Deserialize the object import java io FileInputStream  import java io IOException  import java io ObjectInputStream   public class Reader       public static void main String   args  throws ClassNotFoundException  IOException           Employee employee   new Employee            FileInputStream fin   new FileInputStream  quot  users Jagdish vala employee obj quot            ObjectInputStream ois   new ObjectInputStream fin           employee    Employee  ois readObject            ois close            System out println employee whoIsThis              NOTE  Now change the serialVersionUID of the Employee class and save  private static final long serialVersionUID   4L   And execute the Reader class  Not to execute the Writer class and you will get the exception  Exception in thread  quot main quot  java io InvalidClassException   com jagdish vala java serialVersion Employee  local class incompatible   stream classdesc serialVersionUID   1  local class serialVersionUID   4 at java io ObjectStreamClass initNonProxy ObjectStreamClass java 616  at java io ObjectInputStream readNonProxyDesc ObjectInputStream java 1623  at java io ObjectInputStream readClassDesc ObjectInputStream java 1518  at java io ObjectInputStream readOrdinaryObject ObjectInputStream java 1774  at java io ObjectInputStream readObject0 ObjectInputStream java 1351  at java io ObjectInputStream readObject ObjectInputStream java 371  at com krishantha sample java serialVersion Reader main Reader java 14

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Don t bother  the default calculation is really good and suffice for 99 9999  of the cases  And if you run into problems  you can - as already stated - introduce UID s as the need arrise  which is highly unlikely

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If you re serializing just because you have to serialize for the implementation s sake  who cares if you serialize for an HTTPSession  for instance   if it s stored or not  you probably don t care about de-serializing a form object   then you can ignore this   If you re actually using serialization  it only matters if you plan on storing and retrieving objects using serialization directly   The serialVersionUID represents your class version  and you should increment it if the current version of your class is not backwards compatible with its previous version   Most of the time  you will probably not use serialization directly   If this is the case  generate a default SerialVersionUID by clicking the quick fix option and don t worry about it

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If you want to amend a huge number of classes which had no serialVersionUID set in the first place while maintain the compatibility with the old classes  tools like IntelliJ Idea  Eclipse fall short as they generate random numbers and does not work on a bunch of files in one go  I come up the following bash script I m sorry for Windows users  consider buy a Mac or convert to Linux  to make amending serialVersionUID issue with ease   base dir   pwd                                                                    src dir  base dir src main java                                                   ic api cp  base dir target classes                                                 while read f                                                                      do                                                                                    clazz   f                                                                         clazz   clazz   java                                                              seruidstr   serialver -classpath  ic api cp  clazz   cut -d     -f 2   sed -e  s   s           perl -ni bak -e  print     printf qq  s n   q     private  seruidstr  if  public class    src dir  f done   you save the this script  say add serialVersionUID sh to you   bin  Then you run it in the root directory of your Maven or Gradle project like   add serialVersionUID sh  lt  myJavaToAmend lst   This  lst includes the list of java files to add the serialVersionUID in the following format   com abc ic api model domain item BizOrderTransDO java com abc ic api model domain item CardPassFeature java com abc ic api model domain item CategoryFeature java com abc ic api model domain item GoodsFeature java com abc ic api model domain item ItemFeature java com abc ic api model domain item ItemPicUrls java com abc ic api model domain item ItemSkuDO java com abc ic api model domain serve ServeCategoryFeature java com abc ic api model domain serve ServeFeature java com abc ic api model param depot DepotItemDTO java com abc ic api model param depot DepotItemQueryDTO java com abc ic api model param depot InDepotDTO java com abc ic api model param depot OutDepotDTO java   This script uses the JDK serialVer tool under hood  So make sure your  JAVA HOME bin is in the PATH

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Why use SerialVersionUID inside Serializable class in Java   During serialization  Java runtime creates a version number for a class  so that it can de-serialize it later  This version number is known as SerialVersionUID in Java   SerialVersionUID is used to version serialized data  You can only de-serialize a class if it s SerialVersionUID matches with the serialized instance  When we don t declare SerialVersionUID in our class  Java runtime generates it for us but its not recommended  It s recommended to declare SerialVersionUID as private static final long variable to avoid default mechanism    When you declare a class as Serializable by implementing marker interface java io Serializable  Java runtime persist instance of that class into disk by using default Serialization mechanism  provided you have not customized the process using Externalizable interface   see also Why use SerialVersionUID inside Serializable class in Java

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If you get this warning on a class you don t ever think about serializing  and that you didn t declare yourself implements Serializable  it is often because you inherited from a superclass  which implements Serializable  Often then it would be better to delegate to such a object instead of using inheritance   So  instead of   public class MyExample extends ArrayList lt String gt         public MyExample             super                      do  public class MyExample       private List lt String gt  myList       public MyExample              this myList   new ArrayList lt String gt                       and in the relevant methods call myList foo   instead of this foo    or super foo      This does not fit in all cases  but still quite often    I often see people extending JFrame or such  when they really only need to delegate to this   This also helps for auto-completing in a IDE  since JFrame has hundreds of methods  which you don t need when you want to call your custom ones on your class    One case where the warning  or the serialVersionUID  is unavoidable is when you extend from AbstractAction  normally in a anonymous class  only adding the actionPerformed-method  I think there shouldn t be a warning in this case  since you normally can t reliable serialize and deserialize such anonymous classes anyway accross different versions of your class   but I m not sure how the compiler could recognize this

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A Simple Explanation    Are you serializing data   Serialization is basically writing class data to a file stream etc   De-serialization is reading that data back to a class    Do you intend to go into production   If you are just testing something with unimportant fake data  then don t worry about it  unless you are testing serialization directly     Is this the first version   If so  set serialVersionUID 1L    Is this the second  third  etc  prod version   Now you need to worry about serialVersionUID  and should look into it in depth    Basically  if you don t update the version correctly when you update a class you need to write read  you will get an error when you try to read old data

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I can t pass up this opportunity to plug Josh Bloch s book Effective Java  2nd Edition    Chapter 11 is an indispensible resource on Java serialization   Per Josh  the automatically-generated UID is generated based on a class name  implemented interfaces  and all public and protected members   Changing any of these in any way will change the serialVersionUID   So you don t need to mess with them only if you are certain that no more than one version of the class will ever be serialized  either across processes or retrieved from storage at a later time    If you ignore them for now  and find later that you need to change the class in some way but maintain compatibility w  old version of the class  you can use the JDK tool serialver to generate the serialVersionUID on the old class  and explicitly set that on the new class    Depending on your changes you may need to also implement custom serialization by adding writeObject and readObject methods - see Serializable javadoc or aforementioned chapter 11

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Each time an object is serialized the object is stamped with a version ID number for the object s class This ID is called serialVersionUID and it is computed based on information about the class structure  Suppose you made an Employee class and it has version id  333  assigned by JVM  Now when you will serialize the object of that class  Suppose Employee object   JVM will assign UID to it as  333   Consider a situation - in the future you need to edit or change your class and in that case when you modify it  JVM will assign it a new UID  Suppose  444   Now when you try to deserialize the employee object  JVM will compare serialized object s  Employee object  version ID  333  with that of the class i e  444 Since it was changed   On comparison JVM will find both version UID are different and hence Deserialization will fail  Hence if serialVersionID for each class is defined by programmer itself  It will be same even if the class is evolved in future and hence JVM will always find that class is compatible with serialized object even though the class is changed  For more Info you can refer chapter 14 of HEAD FIRST JAVA

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It would be nice if CheckStyle could verify that the serialVersionUID on a class that implements Serializable has a good value  i e  that it matches what the serial version id  generator would produce   If you have a project with lots of serializable DTOs  for example  remembering to delete the existing serialVersionUID and regenerate it is a pain  and currently the only way  that I know of  to verify this is to regenerate for each class and compare to the old one   This is very very painful

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I can t pass up this opportunity to plug Josh Bloch s book Effective Java  2nd Edition    Chapter 11 is an indispensible resource on Java serialization   Per Josh  the automatically-generated UID is generated based on a class name  implemented interfaces  and all public and protected members   Changing any of these in any way will change the serialVersionUID   So you don t need to mess with them only if you are certain that no more than one version of the class will ever be serialized  either across processes or retrieved from storage at a later time    If you ignore them for now  and find later that you need to change the class in some way but maintain compatibility w  old version of the class  you can use the JDK tool serialver to generate the serialVersionUID on the old class  and explicitly set that on the new class    Depending on your changes you may need to also implement custom serialization by adding writeObject and readObject methods - see Serializable javadoc or aforementioned chapter 11

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This question is very well documented in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch  A very good book and a must read  I will outline some of the reasons below    The serialization runtime comes up with a number called Serial version for each serializable class  This number is called serialVersionUID  Now there is some Math behind this number and it comes out based on the fields methods that are defined in the class  For the same class the same version is generated every time  This number is used during deserialization to verify that the sender and receiver of a serialized object have loaded classes for that object that are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver has loaded a class for the object that has a different serialVersionUID than that of the corresponding sender s class  then deserialization will result in an InvalidClassException   If the class is serializable you can also declare your own serialVersionUID explicitly  by declaring a field named  serialVersionUID  that must be static  final  and of type long  Most IDE s like Eclipse help you generate that long string

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As for an example where the missing serialVersionUID might cause a problem   I m working on this Java EE application that is composed of a Web module that uses an EJB module  The web module calls the EJB module remotely and passes a POJO that implements Serializable as an argument   This POJO s class was packaged inside the EJB jar and inside it s own jar in the WEB-INF lib of the web module  They re actually the same class  but when I package the EJB module I unpack this POJO s jar to pack it together with the EJB module   The call to the EJB was failing with the Exception below because I hadn t declared its serialVersionUID   Caused by  java io IOException  Mismatched serialization UIDs   Source   Rep   IDRMI com hordine pedra softbudget domain Budget 5CF7CE11E6810A36 04A3FEBED5DA4588     04A3FEBED5DA4588 whereas Target  Rep  ID RMI com hordine pedra softbudget domain Budget 7AF5ED7A7CFDFF31 6227F23FA74A9A52     6227F23FA74A9A52

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You can tell Eclipse to ignore these serialVersionUID  warnings      Window   Preferences   Java   Compiler   Errors   Warnings   Potential Programming Problems   In case you didn t know  there are a lot of other warnings you can enable in this section  or even have some reported as errors   many are very useful    Potential Programming Problems  Possible accidental boolean assignment Potential Programming Problems  Null pointer access Unnecessary code  Local variable is never read Unnecessary code  Redundant null check Unnecessary code  Unnecessary cast or  instanceof    and many more

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Original question has asked for  why is it important  and  example  where this Serial Version ID would be useful  Well I have found one   Say you create a Car class  instantiate it  and write it out to an object stream  The flattened car object sits in the file system for some time  Meanwhile  if the Car class is modified by adding a new field  Later on  when you try to read  i e  deserialize  the flattened Car object  you get the java io InvalidClassException     because all serializable classes are automatically given a unique identifier  This exception is thrown when the identifier of the class is not equal to the identifier of the flattened object  If you really think about it  the exception is thrown because of the addition of the new field  You can avoid this exception being thrown by controlling the versioning yourself by declaring an explicit serialVersionUID  There is also a small performance benefit in explicitly declaring your serialVersionUID  because does not have to be calculated   So  it is best practice to add your own serialVersionUID to your Serializable classes as soon as you create them as shown below   public class Car       static final long serialVersionUID   1L    assign a long value

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I generally use serialVersionUID in one context   When I know it will be leaving the context of the Java VM     I would know this when I to use ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream for my application or if I know a library framework I use will use it   The serialVersionID ensures different Java VMs of varying versions or vendors will inter-operate correctly or if it is stored and retrieved outside the VM for example HttpSession the session data can remain even during a restart and upgrade of the application server   For all other cases  I use    SuppressWarnings  serial     since most of the time the default serialVersionUID is sufficient   This includes Exception  HttpServlet

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The docs for java io Serializable are probably about as good an explanation as you ll get   The serialization runtime associates with each serializable class a version number  called a serialVersionUID  which is used during deserialization to verify that the sender and receiver of a serialized object have loaded classes for that object that are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver has loaded a class for the object that has a different serialVersionUID than that of the corresponding sender s class  then deserialization will result in an InvalidClassException  A serializable class can declare its own serialVersionUID explicitly by declaring a field named serialVersionUID that must be static  final  and of type long    ANY-ACCESS-MODIFIER static final long serialVersionUID   42L     If a serializable class does not explicitly declare a serialVersionUID  then the serialization runtime will calculate a default serialVersionUID value for that class based on various aspects of the class  as described in the Java TM  Object Serialization Specification  However  it is strongly recommended that all serializable classes explicitly declare serialVersionUID values  since the default serialVersionUID computation is highly sensitive to class details that may vary depending on compiler implementations  and can thus result in unexpected InvalidClassExceptions during deserialization  Therefore  to guarantee a consistent serialVersionUID value across different java compiler implementations  a serializable class must declare an explicit serialVersionUID value  It is also strongly advised that explicit serialVersionUID declarations use the private modifier where possible  since such declarations apply only to the immediately declaring class     serialVersionUID fields are not useful as inherited members

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What is SerialVersionUID  Answer   - Lets say there are two persons  one from HQ and another from ODC  both are going to perform serialization and deserialization respectively  In this case to authenticate that the receiver who is in ODC is the authenticated person  JVM creates a Unique ID which is known as SerialVersionUID   Here is a nice explanation based on the scenario   Why SerialVersionUID   Serialization   At the time of serialization  with every object sender side JVM will save a Unique Identifier  JVM is responsible to generate that unique ID based on the corresponding  class file which is present in the sender system   Deserialization  At the time of deserialization  receiver side JVM will compare the unique ID associated with the Object with local class Unique ID i e  JVM will also create a Unique ID based on the corresponding  class file which is present in the receiver system  If both unique ID matched then only deserialization will be performed  Otherwise we will get Runtime Exception saying InvalidClassException  This unique Identifier is nothing but SerialVersionUID

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Why use SerialVersionUID inside Serializable class in Java   During serialization  Java runtime creates a version number for a class  so that it can de-serialize it later  This version number is known as SerialVersionUID in Java   SerialVersionUID is used to version serialized data  You can only de-serialize a class if it s SerialVersionUID matches with the serialized instance  When we don t declare SerialVersionUID in our class  Java runtime generates it for us but its not recommended  It s recommended to declare SerialVersionUID as private static final long variable to avoid default mechanism    When you declare a class as Serializable by implementing marker interface java io Serializable  Java runtime persist instance of that class into disk by using default Serialization mechanism  provided you have not customized the process using Externalizable interface   see also Why use SerialVersionUID inside Serializable class in Java

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You can tell Eclipse to ignore these serialVersionUID  warnings      Window   Preferences   Java   Compiler   Errors   Warnings   Potential Programming Problems   In case you didn t know  there are a lot of other warnings you can enable in this section  or even have some reported as errors   many are very useful    Potential Programming Problems  Possible accidental boolean assignment Potential Programming Problems  Null pointer access Unnecessary code  Local variable is never read Unnecessary code  Redundant null check Unnecessary code  Unnecessary cast or  instanceof    and many more

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serialVersionUID facilitates versioning of serialized data  Its value is stored with the data when serializing  When de-serializing  the same version is checked to see how the serialized data matches the current code    If you want to version your data  you normally start with a serialVersionUID of 0  and bump it with every structural change to your class which alters the serialized data  adding or removing non-transient fields     The built-in de-serialization mechanism  in defaultReadObject    will refuse to de-serialize from old versions of the data  But if you want to you can define your own readObject  -function which can read back old data  This custom code can then check the serialVersionUID in order to know which version the data is in and decide how to de-serialize it  This versioning technique is useful if you store serialized data which survives several versions of your code   But storing serialized data for such a long time span is not very common  It is far more common to use the serialization mechanism to temporarily write data to for instance a cache or send it over the network to another program with the same version of the relevant parts of the codebase    In this case you are not interested in maintaining backwards compatibility  You are only concerned with making sure that the code bases which are communicating indeed have the same versions of relevant classes  In order to facilitate such a check  you must maintain the serialVersionUID just like before and not forget to update it when making changes to your classes    If you do forget to update the field  you might end up with two different versions of a class with different structure but with the same serialVersionUID  If this happens  the default mechanism  in defaultReadObject    will not detect any difference  and try to de-serialize incompatible data  Now you might end up with a cryptic runtime error or silent failure  null fields   These types of errors might be hard to find   So to help this usecase  the Java platform offers you a choice of not setting the serialVersionUID manually  Instead  a hash of the class structure will be generated at compile-time and used as id  This mechanism will make sure that you never have different class structures with the same id  and so you will not get these hard-to-trace runtime serialization failures mentioned above   But there is a backside to the auto-generated id strategy  Namely that the generated ids for the same class might differ between compilers  as mentioned by Jon Skeet above   So if you communicate serialized data between code compiled with different compilers  it is recommended to maintain the ids manually anyway    And if you are backwards-compatible with your data like in the first use case mentioned  you also probably want to maintain the id yourself  This in order to get readable ids and have greater control over when and how they change

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I generally use serialVersionUID in one context   When I know it will be leaving the context of the Java VM     I would know this when I to use ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream for my application or if I know a library framework I use will use it   The serialVersionID ensures different Java VMs of varying versions or vendors will inter-operate correctly or if it is stored and retrieved outside the VM for example HttpSession the session data can remain even during a restart and upgrade of the application server   For all other cases  I use    SuppressWarnings  serial     since most of the time the default serialVersionUID is sufficient   This includes Exception  HttpServlet

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This question is very well documented in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch  A very good book and a must read  I will outline some of the reasons below    The serialization runtime comes up with a number called Serial version for each serializable class  This number is called serialVersionUID  Now there is some Math behind this number and it comes out based on the fields methods that are defined in the class  For the same class the same version is generated every time  This number is used during deserialization to verify that the sender and receiver of a serialized object have loaded classes for that object that are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver has loaded a class for the object that has a different serialVersionUID than that of the corresponding sender s class  then deserialization will result in an InvalidClassException   If the class is serializable you can also declare your own serialVersionUID explicitly  by declaring a field named  serialVersionUID  that must be static  final  and of type long  Most IDE s like Eclipse help you generate that long string

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The docs for java io Serializable are probably about as good an explanation as you ll get   The serialization runtime associates with each serializable class a version number  called a serialVersionUID  which is used during deserialization to verify that the sender and receiver of a serialized object have loaded classes for that object that are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver has loaded a class for the object that has a different serialVersionUID than that of the corresponding sender s class  then deserialization will result in an InvalidClassException  A serializable class can declare its own serialVersionUID explicitly by declaring a field named serialVersionUID that must be static  final  and of type long    ANY-ACCESS-MODIFIER static final long serialVersionUID   42L     If a serializable class does not explicitly declare a serialVersionUID  then the serialization runtime will calculate a default serialVersionUID value for that class based on various aspects of the class  as described in the Java TM  Object Serialization Specification  However  it is strongly recommended that all serializable classes explicitly declare serialVersionUID values  since the default serialVersionUID computation is highly sensitive to class details that may vary depending on compiler implementations  and can thus result in unexpected InvalidClassExceptions during deserialization  Therefore  to guarantee a consistent serialVersionUID value across different java compiler implementations  a serializable class must declare an explicit serialVersionUID value  It is also strongly advised that explicit serialVersionUID declarations use the private modifier where possible  since such declarations apply only to the immediately declaring class     serialVersionUID fields are not useful as inherited members

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What is a serialVersionUID and why should I use it    SerialVersionUID is a unique identifier for each class  JVM uses it to compare the versions of the class ensuring that the same class was used during Serialization is loaded during Deserialization   Specifying one gives more control  though JVM does generate one if you don t specify  The value generated can differ between different compilers  Furthermore  sometimes you just want for some reason to forbid deserialization of old serialized objects  backward incompatibility   and in this case you just have to change the serialVersionUID    The javadocs for Serializable say      the default serialVersionUID computation is highly sensitive to class   details that may vary depending on compiler implementations  and can   thus result in unexpected InvalidClassExceptions during   deserialization    Therefore  you must declare serialVersionUID because it give us more control   This article has some good points on the topic

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It would be nice if CheckStyle could verify that the serialVersionUID on a class that implements Serializable has a good value  i e  that it matches what the serial version id  generator would produce   If you have a project with lots of serializable DTOs  for example  remembering to delete the existing serialVersionUID and regenerate it is a pain  and currently the only way  that I know of  to verify this is to regenerate for each class and compare to the old one   This is very very painful

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The docs for java io Serializable are probably about as good an explanation as you ll get   The serialization runtime associates with each serializable class a version number  called a serialVersionUID  which is used during deserialization to verify that the sender and receiver of a serialized object have loaded classes for that object that are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver has loaded a class for the object that has a different serialVersionUID than that of the corresponding sender s class  then deserialization will result in an InvalidClassException  A serializable class can declare its own serialVersionUID explicitly by declaring a field named serialVersionUID that must be static  final  and of type long    ANY-ACCESS-MODIFIER static final long serialVersionUID   42L     If a serializable class does not explicitly declare a serialVersionUID  then the serialization runtime will calculate a default serialVersionUID value for that class based on various aspects of the class  as described in the Java TM  Object Serialization Specification  However  it is strongly recommended that all serializable classes explicitly declare serialVersionUID values  since the default serialVersionUID computation is highly sensitive to class details that may vary depending on compiler implementations  and can thus result in unexpected InvalidClassExceptions during deserialization  Therefore  to guarantee a consistent serialVersionUID value across different java compiler implementations  a serializable class must declare an explicit serialVersionUID value  It is also strongly advised that explicit serialVersionUID declarations use the private modifier where possible  since such declarations apply only to the immediately declaring class     serialVersionUID fields are not useful as inherited members

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To tell the long story short this field is used to check if serialized data can be deserialized correctly  Serialization and deserialization are often made by different copies of program - for example server converts object to string and client converts received string to object  This field tells that both operates with same idea about what this object is  This field helps when    you have many different copies of your program in different places  like 1 server and 100 clients   If you will change your object  alter your version number and forget to update one this clients  it will know that he is not capable of deserialization you have stored your data in some file and later on you try to open it with updated version of your program with modified object - you will know that this file is not compatible if you keep your version right   When is it important    Most obvious - if you add some fields to your object  older versions will not be able to use them because they do not have these fields in their object structure   Less obvious - When you deserialize object  fields that where not present in string will be kept as NULL  If you have removed field from your object  older versions will keep this field as allways-NULL that can lead to misbehavior if older versions rely on data in this field  anyway you have created it for something  not just for fun  -      Least obvious - Sometimes you change the idea you put in some field s meaning  For example when you are 12 years old you mean  bicycle  under  bike   but when you are 18 you mean  motorcycle  - if your friends will invite you to  bike ride across city  and you will be the only one who came on bicycle  you will undestand how important it is to keep same meaning across fields  -

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What is SerialVersionUID  Answer   - Lets say there are two persons  one from HQ and another from ODC  both are going to perform serialization and deserialization respectively  In this case to authenticate that the receiver who is in ODC is the authenticated person  JVM creates a Unique ID which is known as SerialVersionUID   Here is a nice explanation based on the scenario   Why SerialVersionUID   Serialization   At the time of serialization  with every object sender side JVM will save a Unique Identifier  JVM is responsible to generate that unique ID based on the corresponding  class file which is present in the sender system   Deserialization  At the time of deserialization  receiver side JVM will compare the unique ID associated with the Object with local class Unique ID i e  JVM will also create a Unique ID based on the corresponding  class file which is present in the receiver system  If both unique ID matched then only deserialization will be performed  Otherwise we will get Runtime Exception saying InvalidClassException  This unique Identifier is nothing but SerialVersionUID

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A Simple Explanation    Are you serializing data   Serialization is basically writing class data to a file stream etc   De-serialization is reading that data back to a class    Do you intend to go into production   If you are just testing something with unimportant fake data  then don t worry about it  unless you are testing serialization directly     Is this the first version   If so  set serialVersionUID 1L    Is this the second  third  etc  prod version   Now you need to worry about serialVersionUID  and should look into it in depth    Basically  if you don t update the version correctly when you update a class you need to write read  you will get an error when you try to read old data

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serialVersionUID  is a 64 bit number used to uniquely identify a class during deserialization process  When you serialize an object  serialVersionUID of the class also written to the file  Whenever you deserialize this object  java run time extract this serialVersionUID value from the serialized data and compare the same value associate with the class  If both do not match  then  java io InvalidClassException  will be thrown   If a serializable class do not explicitly declare a serialVersionUID  then serialization runtime will calculate  serialVersionUID value for that class based on various aspects of the class like fields  methods etc    You can refer this link for demo application

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To understand the significance of field serialVersionUID  one should understand how Serialization Deserialization works   When a Serializable class object is serialized Java Runtime associates a serial version no  called as serialVersionUID  with this serialized object  At the time when you deserialize this serialized object Java Runtime matches the serialVersionUID of serialized object with the serialVersionUID of the class  If both are equal then only it proceeds with the further process of deserialization else throws InvalidClassException   So we conclude that to make Serialization Deserialization process successful the serialVersionUID of serialized object must be equivalent to the serialVersionUID of the class  In case if programmer specifies the serialVersionUID value explicitly in the program then the same value will be associated with the serialized object and the class  irrespective of the serialization and deserialzation platform for ex  serialization might be done on platform like windows by using sun or MS JVM and Deserialization might be on different platform Linux using Zing JVM    But in case if serialVersionUID is not specified by programmer then while doing Serialization DeSerialization  of any object  Java runtime uses its own algorithm to calculate it  This serialVersionUID calculation algorithm varies from one JRE to another  It is also possible that the environment where the object is serialized is using one JRE  ex  SUN JVM  and the environment where deserialzation happens is using Linux Jvm zing   In such cases serialVersionUID associated with serialized object will be different than the serialVersionUID of class calculated at deserialzation environment  In turn deserialization will not be successful  So to avoid such situations issues programmer must always specify serialVersionUID of Serializable class

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If you want to amend a huge number of classes which had no serialVersionUID set in the first place while maintain the compatibility with the old classes  tools like IntelliJ Idea  Eclipse fall short as they generate random numbers and does not work on a bunch of files in one go  I come up the following bash script I m sorry for Windows users  consider buy a Mac or convert to Linux  to make amending serialVersionUID issue with ease   base dir   pwd                                                                    src dir  base dir src main java                                                   ic api cp  base dir target classes                                                 while read f                                                                      do                                                                                    clazz   f                                                                         clazz   clazz   java                                                              seruidstr   serialver -classpath  ic api cp  clazz   cut -d     -f 2   sed -e  s   s           perl -ni bak -e  print     printf qq  s n   q     private  seruidstr  if  public class    src dir  f done   you save the this script  say add serialVersionUID sh to you   bin  Then you run it in the root directory of your Maven or Gradle project like   add serialVersionUID sh  lt  myJavaToAmend lst   This  lst includes the list of java files to add the serialVersionUID in the following format   com abc ic api model domain item BizOrderTransDO java com abc ic api model domain item CardPassFeature java com abc ic api model domain item CategoryFeature java com abc ic api model domain item GoodsFeature java com abc ic api model domain item ItemFeature java com abc ic api model domain item ItemPicUrls java com abc ic api model domain item ItemSkuDO java com abc ic api model domain serve ServeCategoryFeature java com abc ic api model domain serve ServeFeature java com abc ic api model param depot DepotItemDTO java com abc ic api model param depot DepotItemQueryDTO java com abc ic api model param depot InDepotDTO java com abc ic api model param depot OutDepotDTO java   This script uses the JDK serialVer tool under hood  So make sure your  JAVA HOME bin is in the PATH

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Don t bother  the default calculation is really good and suffice for 99 9999  of the cases  And if you run into problems  you can - as already stated - introduce UID s as the need arrise  which is highly unlikely

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First I need to explain what serialization is  Serialization allows to convert an object to a stream  for sending that object over the network OR Save to file OR save into DB for letter usage  There are some rules for serialization   An object is serializable only if its class or its superclass implements the Serializable interface  An object is serializable  itself implements the Serializable interface  even if its superclass is not  However  the first superclass in the hierarchy of the serializable class  that does not implements Serializable interface  MUST have a no-arg constructor  If this is violated  readObject   will produce a java io InvalidClassException in runtime  All primitive types are serializable   Transient fields  with transient modifier  are NOT serialized   i e   not saved or restored   A class that implements Serializable must mark transient fields of classes that do not support serialization  e g   a file stream    Static fields  with static modifier  are not serialized    When Object is serialized  Java Runtime associates the serial version number aka  the serialVersionID  Where we need serialVersionID  During the deserialization to verify that sender and receiver are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver loaded the class with a different serialVersionID then deserialization will end with InvalidClassCastException  A serializable class can declare its own serialVersionUID explicitly by declaring a field named serialVersionUID that must be static  final  and of type long  Let s try this with an example  import java io Serializable   public class Employee implements Serializable       private static final long serialVersionUID   1L      private String empname      private byte empage       public String getEmpName             return name             public void setEmpName String empname            this empname   empname             public byte getEmpAge             return empage             public void setEmpAge byte empage            this empage   empage             public String whoIsThis             return getEmpName      quot  is  quot    getEmpAge      quot years old quot            Create Serialize Object import java io FileOutputStream  import java io IOException  import java io ObjectOutputStream   public class Writer       public static void main String   args  throws IOException           Employee employee   new Employee            employee setEmpName  quot Jagdish quot            employee setEmpAge  byte  30            FileOutputStream fout   new                 FileOutputStream  quot  users Jagdish vala employee obj quot            ObjectOutputStream oos   new ObjectOutputStream fout           oos writeObject employee           oos close            System out println  quot Process complete quot             Deserialize the object import java io FileInputStream  import java io IOException  import java io ObjectInputStream   public class Reader       public static void main String   args  throws ClassNotFoundException  IOException           Employee employee   new Employee            FileInputStream fin   new FileInputStream  quot  users Jagdish vala employee obj quot            ObjectInputStream ois   new ObjectInputStream fin           employee    Employee  ois readObject            ois close            System out println employee whoIsThis              NOTE  Now change the serialVersionUID of the Employee class and save  private static final long serialVersionUID   4L   And execute the Reader class  Not to execute the Writer class and you will get the exception  Exception in thread  quot main quot  java io InvalidClassException   com jagdish vala java serialVersion Employee  local class incompatible   stream classdesc serialVersionUID   1  local class serialVersionUID   4 at java io ObjectStreamClass initNonProxy ObjectStreamClass java 616  at java io ObjectInputStream readNonProxyDesc ObjectInputStream java 1623  at java io ObjectInputStream readClassDesc ObjectInputStream java 1518  at java io ObjectInputStream readOrdinaryObject ObjectInputStream java 1774  at java io ObjectInputStream readObject0 ObjectInputStream java 1351  at java io ObjectInputStream readObject ObjectInputStream java 371  at com krishantha sample java serialVersion Reader main Reader java 14

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If you re serializing just because you have to serialize for the implementation s sake  who cares if you serialize for an HTTPSession  for instance   if it s stored or not  you probably don t care about de-serializing a form object   then you can ignore this   If you re actually using serialization  it only matters if you plan on storing and retrieving objects using serialization directly   The serialVersionUID represents your class version  and you should increment it if the current version of your class is not backwards compatible with its previous version   Most of the time  you will probably not use serialization directly   If this is the case  generate a default SerialVersionUID by clicking the quick fix option and don t worry about it

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I can t pass up this opportunity to plug Josh Bloch s book Effective Java  2nd Edition    Chapter 11 is an indispensible resource on Java serialization   Per Josh  the automatically-generated UID is generated based on a class name  implemented interfaces  and all public and protected members   Changing any of these in any way will change the serialVersionUID   So you don t need to mess with them only if you are certain that no more than one version of the class will ever be serialized  either across processes or retrieved from storage at a later time    If you ignore them for now  and find later that you need to change the class in some way but maintain compatibility w  old version of the class  you can use the JDK tool serialver to generate the serialVersionUID on the old class  and explicitly set that on the new class    Depending on your changes you may need to also implement custom serialization by adding writeObject and readObject methods - see Serializable javadoc or aforementioned chapter 11

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The docs for java io Serializable are probably about as good an explanation as you ll get   The serialization runtime associates with each serializable class a version number  called a serialVersionUID  which is used during deserialization to verify that the sender and receiver of a serialized object have loaded classes for that object that are compatible with respect to serialization  If the receiver has loaded a class for the object that has a different serialVersionUID than that of the corresponding sender s class  then deserialization will result in an InvalidClassException  A serializable class can declare its own serialVersionUID explicitly by declaring a field named serialVersionUID that must be static  final  and of type long    ANY-ACCESS-MODIFIER static final long serialVersionUID   42L     If a serializable class does not explicitly declare a serialVersionUID  then the serialization runtime will calculate a default serialVersionUID value for that class based on various aspects of the class  as described in the Java TM  Object Serialization Specification  However  it is strongly recommended that all serializable classes explicitly declare serialVersionUID values  since the default serialVersionUID computation is highly sensitive to class details that may vary depending on compiler implementations  and can thus result in unexpected InvalidClassExceptions during deserialization  Therefore  to guarantee a consistent serialVersionUID value across different java compiler implementations  a serializable class must declare an explicit serialVersionUID value  It is also strongly advised that explicit serialVersionUID declarations use the private modifier where possible  since such declarations apply only to the immediately declaring class     serialVersionUID fields are not useful as inherited members

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I can t pass up this opportunity to plug Josh Bloch s book Effective Java  2nd Edition    Chapter 11 is an indispensible resource on Java serialization   Per Josh  the automatically-generated UID is generated based on a class name  implemented interfaces  and all public and protected members   Changing any of these in any way will change the serialVersionUID   So you don t need to mess with them only if you are certain that no more than one version of the class will ever be serialized  either across processes or retrieved from storage at a later time    If you ignore them for now  and find later that you need to change the class in some way but maintain compatibility w  old version of the class  you can use the JDK tool serialver to generate the serialVersionUID on the old class  and explicitly set that on the new class    Depending on your changes you may need to also implement custom serialization by adding writeObject and readObject methods - see Serializable javadoc or aforementioned chapter 11

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You can tell Eclipse to ignore these serialVersionUID  warnings      Window   Preferences   Java   Compiler   Errors   Warnings   Potential Programming Problems   In case you didn t know  there are a lot of other warnings you can enable in this section  or even have some reported as errors   many are very useful    Potential Programming Problems  Possible accidental boolean assignment Potential Programming Problems  Null pointer access Unnecessary code  Local variable is never read Unnecessary code  Redundant null check Unnecessary code  Unnecessary cast or  instanceof    and many more

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If you will never need to serialize your objects to byte array and send store them  then you don t need to worry about it  If you do  then you must consider your serialVersionUID since the deserializer of the object will match it to the version of object its classloader has  Read more about it in the Java Language Specification

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It would be nice if CheckStyle could verify that the serialVersionUID on a class that implements Serializable has a good value  i e  that it matches what the serial version id  generator would produce   If you have a project with lots of serializable DTOs  for example  remembering to delete the existing serialVersionUID and regenerate it is a pain  and currently the only way  that I know of  to verify this is to regenerate for each class and compare to the old one   This is very very painful

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Firstly to answer your question  when we don t declare SerialVersionUID in our class  Java runtime generates it for us  but that process is sensitive to many class meta data including number of fields  type of fields  access modifier of fields  interface implemented by class etc  Therefore it is recommended to declare it ourselves and Eclipse is warning you about the same   Serialization  We often work with important objects whose state  data in the variables of the object  is so important that we can not risk to lose it due to power system failures  or  network failures in case of sending the object state to other machine  The solution for this problem is named  Persistence  which simply means persisting  holding saving  the data  Serialization is one of many other ways to achieve persistence  by saving data to disk memory   When saving the state of the object  it is important to create an identity for the object  to be able to properly read it back  de-serialization   This unique identification is ID is SerialVersionUID

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serialVersionUID  is a 64 bit number used to uniquely identify a class during deserialization process  When you serialize an object  serialVersionUID of the class also written to the file  Whenever you deserialize this object  java run time extract this serialVersionUID value from the serialized data and compare the same value associate with the class  If both do not match  then  java io InvalidClassException  will be thrown   If a serializable class do not explicitly declare a serialVersionUID  then serialization runtime will calculate  serialVersionUID value for that class based on various aspects of the class like fields  methods etc    You can refer this link for demo application

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What is a serialVersionUID and why should I use it    SerialVersionUID is a unique identifier for each class  JVM uses it to compare the versions of the class ensuring that the same class was used during Serialization is loaded during Deserialization   Specifying one gives more control  though JVM does generate one if you don t specify  The value generated can differ between different compilers  Furthermore  sometimes you just want for some reason to forbid deserialization of old serialized objects  backward incompatibility   and in this case you just have to change the serialVersionUID    The javadocs for Serializable say      the default serialVersionUID computation is highly sensitive to class   details that may vary depending on compiler implementations  and can   thus result in unexpected InvalidClassExceptions during   deserialization    Therefore  you must declare serialVersionUID because it give us more control   This article has some good points on the topic

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Field data represents some information stored in the class  Class implements the Serializable interface   so eclipse automatically offered  to declare the serialVersionUID field  Lets start with value 1 set there   If you don t want that warning to come  use this    SuppressWarnings  serial

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To understand the significance of field serialVersionUID  one should understand how Serialization Deserialization works   When a Serializable class object is serialized Java Runtime associates a serial version no  called as serialVersionUID  with this serialized object  At the time when you deserialize this serialized object Java Runtime matches the serialVersionUID of serialized object with the serialVersionUID of the class  If both are equal then only it proceeds with the further process of deserialization else throws InvalidClassException   So we conclude that to make Serialization Deserialization process successful the serialVersionUID of serialized object must be equivalent to the serialVersionUID of the class  In case if programmer specifies the serialVersionUID value explicitly in the program then the same value will be associated with the serialized object and the class  irrespective of the serialization and deserialzation platform for ex  serialization might be done on platform like windows by using sun or MS JVM and Deserialization might be on different platform Linux using Zing JVM    But in case if serialVersionUID is not specified by programmer then while doing Serialization DeSerialization  of any object  Java runtime uses its own algorithm to calculate it  This serialVersionUID calculation algorithm varies from one JRE to another  It is also possible that the environment where the object is serialized is using one JRE  ex  SUN JVM  and the environment where deserialzation happens is using Linux Jvm zing   In such cases serialVersionUID associated with serialized object will be different than the serialVersionUID of class calculated at deserialzation environment  In turn deserialization will not be successful  So to avoid such situations issues programmer must always specify serialVersionUID of Serializable class

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Original question has asked for  why is it important  and  example  where this Serial Version ID would be useful  Well I have found one   Say you create a Car class  instantiate it  and write it out to an object stream  The flattened car object sits in the file system for some time  Meanwhile  if the Car class is modified by adding a new field  Later on  when you try to read  i e  deserialize  the flattened Car object  you get the java io InvalidClassException     because all serializable classes are automatically given a unique identifier  This exception is thrown when the identifier of the class is not equal to the identifier of the flattened object  If you really think about it  the exception is thrown because of the addition of the new field  You can avoid this exception being thrown by controlling the versioning yourself by declaring an explicit serialVersionUID  There is also a small performance benefit in explicitly declaring your serialVersionUID  because does not have to be calculated   So  it is best practice to add your own serialVersionUID to your Serializable classes as soon as you create them as shown below   public class Car       static final long serialVersionUID   1L    assign a long value

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If you re serializing just because you have to serialize for the implementation s sake  who cares if you serialize for an HTTPSession  for instance   if it s stored or not  you probably don t care about de-serializing a form object   then you can ignore this   If you re actually using serialization  it only matters if you plan on storing and retrieving objects using serialization directly   The serialVersionUID represents your class version  and you should increment it if the current version of your class is not backwards compatible with its previous version   Most of the time  you will probably not use serialization directly   If this is the case  generate a default SerialVersionUID by clicking the quick fix option and don t worry about it

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serialVersionUID facilitates versioning of serialized data  Its value is stored with the data when serializing  When de-serializing  the same version is checked to see how the serialized data matches the current code    If you want to version your data  you normally start with a serialVersionUID of 0  and bump it with every structural change to your class which alters the serialized data  adding or removing non-transient fields     The built-in de-serialization mechanism  in defaultReadObject    will refuse to de-serialize from old versions of the data  But if you want to you can define your own readObject  -function which can read back old data  This custom code can then check the serialVersionUID in order to know which version the data is in and decide how to de-serialize it  This versioning technique is useful if you store serialized data which survives several versions of your code   But storing serialized data for such a long time span is not very common  It is far more common to use the serialization mechanism to temporarily write data to for instance a cache or send it over the network to another program with the same version of the relevant parts of the codebase    In this case you are not interested in maintaining backwards compatibility  You are only concerned with making sure that the code bases which are communicating indeed have the same versions of relevant classes  In order to facilitate such a check  you must maintain the serialVersionUID just like before and not forget to update it when making changes to your classes    If you do forget to update the field  you might end up with two different versions of a class with different structure but with the same serialVersionUID  If this happens  the default mechanism  in defaultReadObject    will not detect any difference  and try to de-serialize incompatible data  Now you might end up with a cryptic runtime error or silent failure  null fields   These types of errors might be hard to find   So to help this usecase  the Java platform offers you a choice of not setting the serialVersionUID manually  Instead  a hash of the class structure will be generated at compile-time and used as id  This mechanism will make sure that you never have different class structures with the same id  and so you will not get these hard-to-trace runtime serialization failures mentioned above   But there is a backside to the auto-generated id strategy  Namely that the generated ids for the same class might differ between compilers  as mentioned by Jon Skeet above   So if you communicate serialized data between code compiled with different compilers  it is recommended to maintain the ids manually anyway    And if you are backwards-compatible with your data like in the first use case mentioned  you also probably want to maintain the id yourself  This in order to get readable ids and have greater control over when and how they change

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As for an example where the missing serialVersionUID might cause a problem   I m working on this Java EE application that is composed of a Web module that uses an EJB module  The web module calls the EJB module remotely and passes a POJO that implements Serializable as an argument   This POJO s class was packaged inside the EJB jar and inside it s own jar in the WEB-INF lib of the web module  They re actually the same class  but when I package the EJB module I unpack this POJO s jar to pack it together with the EJB module   The call to the EJB was failing with the Exception below because I hadn t declared its serialVersionUID   Caused by  java io IOException  Mismatched serialization UIDs   Source   Rep   IDRMI com hordine pedra softbudget domain Budget 5CF7CE11E6810A36 04A3FEBED5DA4588     04A3FEBED5DA4588 whereas Target  Rep  ID RMI com hordine pedra softbudget domain Budget 7AF5ED7A7CFDFF31 6227F23FA74A9A52     6227F23FA74A9A52

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SerialVersionUID is used for version control of object  you can specify serialVersionUID in your class file also  Consequence of not specifying serialVersionUID is that when you add or modify any field in class then already serialized class will not be able to recover because serialVersionUID generated for new class and for old serialized object will be different  Java serialization process relies on correct serialVersionUID for recovering state of serialized object and throws java io InvalidClassException in case of serialVersionUID mismatch  Read more  http   javarevisited blogspot com 2011 04 top-10-java-serialization-interview html ixzz3VQxnpOPZ

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SerialVersionUID is used for version control of object  you can specify serialVersionUID in your class file also  Consequence of not specifying serialVersionUID is that when you add or modify any field in class then already serialized class will not be able to recover because serialVersionUID generated for new class and for old serialized object will be different  Java serialization process relies on correct serialVersionUID for recovering state of serialized object and throws java io InvalidClassException in case of serialVersionUID mismatch  Read more  http   javarevisited blogspot com 2011 04 top-10-java-serialization-interview html ixzz3VQxnpOPZ

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If you re serializing just because you have to serialize for the implementation s sake  who cares if you serialize for an HTTPSession  for instance   if it s stored or not  you probably don t care about de-serializing a form object   then you can ignore this   If you re actually using serialization  it only matters if you plan on storing and retrieving objects using serialization directly   The serialVersionUID represents your class version  and you should increment it if the current version of your class is not backwards compatible with its previous version   Most of the time  you will probably not use serialization directly   If this is the case  generate a default SerialVersionUID by clicking the quick fix option and don t worry about it

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To tell the long story short this field is used to check if serialized data can be deserialized correctly  Serialization and deserialization are often made by different copies of program - for example server converts object to string and client converts received string to object  This field tells that both operates with same idea about what this object is  This field helps when    you have many different copies of your program in different places  like 1 server and 100 clients   If you will change your object  alter your version number and forget to update one this clients  it will know that he is not capable of deserialization you have stored your data in some file and later on you try to open it with updated version of your program with modified object - you will know that this file is not compatible if you keep your version right   When is it important    Most obvious - if you add some fields to your object  older versions will not be able to use them because they do not have these fields in their object structure   Less obvious - When you deserialize object  fields that where not present in string will be kept as NULL  If you have removed field from your object  older versions will keep this field as allways-NULL that can lead to misbehavior if older versions rely on data in this field  anyway you have created it for something  not just for fun  -      Least obvious - Sometimes you change the idea you put in some field s meaning  For example when you are 12 years old you mean  bicycle  under  bike   but when you are 18 you mean  motorcycle  - if your friends will invite you to  bike ride across city  and you will be the only one who came on bicycle  you will undestand how important it is to keep same meaning across fields  -

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If you will never need to serialize your objects to byte array and send store them  then you don t need to worry about it  If you do  then you must consider your serialVersionUID since the deserializer of the object will match it to the version of object its classloader has  Read more about it in the Java Language Specification

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If you get this warning on a class you don t ever think about serializing  and that you didn t declare yourself implements Serializable  it is often because you inherited from a superclass  which implements Serializable  Often then it would be better to delegate to such a object instead of using inheritance   So  instead of   public class MyExample extends ArrayList lt String gt         public MyExample             super                      do  public class MyExample       private List lt String gt  myList       public MyExample              this myList   new ArrayList lt String gt                       and in the relevant methods call myList foo   instead of this foo    or super foo      This does not fit in all cases  but still quite often    I often see people extending JFrame or such  when they really only need to delegate to this   This also helps for auto-completing in a IDE  since JFrame has hundreds of methods  which you don t need when you want to call your custom ones on your class    One case where the warning  or the serialVersionUID  is unavoidable is when you extend from AbstractAction  normally in a anonymous class  only adding the actionPerformed-method  I think there shouldn t be a warning in this case  since you normally can t reliable serialize and deserialize such anonymous classes anyway accross different versions of your class   but I m not sure how the compiler could recognize this

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If you will never need to serialize your objects to byte array and send store them  then you don t need to worry about it  If you do  then you must consider your serialVersionUID since the deserializer of the object will match it to the version of object its classloader has  Read more about it in the Java Language Specification

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It would be nice if CheckStyle could verify that the serialVersionUID on a class that implements Serializable has a good value  i e  that it matches what the serial version id  generator would produce   If you have a project with lots of serializable DTOs  for example  remembering to delete the existing serialVersionUID and regenerate it is a pain  and currently the only way  that I know of  to verify this is to regenerate for each class and compare to the old one   This is very very painful

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If you will never need to serialize your objects to byte array and send store them  then you don t need to worry about it  If you do  then you must consider your serialVersionUID since the deserializer of the object will match it to the version of object its classloader has  Read more about it in the Java Language Specification

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Field data represents some information stored in the class  Class implements the Serializable interface   so eclipse automatically offered  to declare the serialVersionUID field  Lets start with value 1 set there   If you don t want that warning to come  use this    SuppressWarnings  serial

[java] What is a serialVersionUID and why should I use it?

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