SerializationException

A generic exception indicating the problem in serialization or deserialization process.

This is a generic exception type that can be thrown during problems at any stage of the serialization, including encoding, decoding, serialization, deserialization, and validation. SerialFormat implementors should throw subclasses of this exception at any unexpected event, whether it is a malformed input or unsupported class layout.

SerializationException is a subclass of IllegalArgumentException for the sake of consistency and user-defined validation: Any serialization exception is triggered by the illegal input, whether it is a serializer that does not support specific structure or an invalid input.

It is also an established pattern to validate input in user's classes in the following manner:

@Serializable
class Foo(...) {
    init {
        required(age 0) { ... }
        require(name.isNotBlank()) { ... }
    }
}

While clearly being serialization error (when compromised data was deserialized), Kotlin way is to throw IllegalArgumentException here instead of using library-specific SerializationException.

For general "catch-all" patterns around deserialization of potentially untrusted/invalid/corrupted data it is recommended to catch IllegalArgumentException type to avoid catching irrelevant to serialization errors such as OutOfMemoryError or domain-specific ones.

Inheritors