Recursive call to Equals(object)¶
ID: cs/recursive-equals-call
Kind: problem
Security severity:
Severity: error
Precision: high
Tags:
- reliability
- maintainability
Query suites:
- csharp-security-and-quality.qls
Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
Recursive calls to Equals(object) are often made by accident whilst trying to forward to another Equals method with a more specific parameter type. This tends to result in a stack overflow exception.
Recommendation¶
The solution is to check that the argument is of the appropriate type and then cast it when making the call.
Example¶
In this example the Equals(object) method is called repeatedly when the programmer clearly meant to pass the object to the Equals(C) method but forgot to cast it in order to do so.
class RecursiveEquals
{
class C
{
private int i = 0;
public override bool Equals(object rhs)
{
if (rhs.GetType() != this.GetType()) return false;
return Equals(rhs);
}
public bool Equals(C rhs)
{
return (rhs != null && this.i == rhs.i);
}
}
}
This mistake is easily corrected by performing a cast before making the second call.
class RecursiveEqualsFix
{
class C
{
private int i = 0;
public override bool Equals(object rhs)
{
if (rhs.GetType() != this.GetType()) return false;
return Equals((C)rhs);
}
public bool Equals(C rhs)
{
return (rhs != null && this.i == rhs.i);
}
}
}