Eclipse auto-generation of serialVersionUID with each change

Question

Eclipse nicely generates the serialVersionUID for me. But this seems to be passive code generation as the id won\'t be automatically updated as I change the file unless I do

Answer 1

There is no standard functionality in Eclipse to do this.

Answer 2

You could update the serial version at build time with the Ant SerialVer task.

Answer 3

the id won't be automatically updated as I change the file unless I do the generation again.

AFAIK default serialVersionUID is just this -- an id generated based on current "shape" of a class. So if you want your id generated when you change anything -- just leave it out.

However, if you want to change serialVersionUID only sometimes -- just change it. Random modification to the id will do.

Random number is only little better than consecutive numbers (if you can assume no one else makes up a class with the same qualified name in your environment), so you may even start from serialVersionUID = 1 and increment this number at will.