Cannot Marshal Channel or Function
ID |
go.cannot_marshal_chan_function |
Severity |
high |
Remediation Complexity |
simple |
Remediation Risk |
low |
Remediation Effort |
low |
Resource |
Reliability |
Language |
Go |
Tags |
correctness, reliability |
Description
Reports a json or xml marshal call whose argument is a struct that declares a channel or
function field. The reflection-based marshallers cannot encode channel or function values.
Rationale
encoding/json and encoding/xml serialize values through reflection and have no representation
for channels or functions. Marshalling a value whose type contains such a field fails at run time
with an UnsupportedTypeError, which is usually only discovered when the code path executes.
type withChan struct {
Ch chan int
}
func emit(c withChan) {
json.Marshal(c) // FLAW — a channel cannot be marshalled
}Remediation
Remove the channel or function field from the marshalled type, tag it with json:"-" / xml:"-"
to skip it, or marshal a separate serializable view of the data.