[JENKINS-25925] More polite reporting of NotSerializableException

If you accidentally store something nonserializable in a local variable, you get a nasty stack trace mentioning org.jboss.marshalling.river.RiverMarshaller.doWriteObject and other things which will make no sense to a user and imply a bug in Workflow rather than in your script.

RiverWriter should defend better against this. It could replace the bad object with null, after printing a warning in the log. Or it could simply replace it with a pickle that rehydrates to null or throws an exception if you ever resume this flow after a restart. I think replacement with null is preferable since in most cases you did not really need the object to be saved and the flow could have continued without it.

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Originally reported by jglick, imported from: More polite reporting of NotSerializableException

• assignee: kohsuke
  
• status: Open
  
• priority: Major
  
• component(s): workflow-support-plugin
  
• label(s): robustness, serialization
  
• resolution: Unresolved
  
• votes: 7
  
• watchers: 11
  
• imported: 20260601-173816
  

If you accidentally store something nonserializable in a local variable, you get a nasty stack trace mentioning org.jboss.marshalling.river.RiverMarshaller.doWriteObject and other things which will make no sense to a user and imply a bug in Workflow rather than in your script.


RiverWriter should defend better against this. It could replace the bad object with null, after printing a warning in the log. Or it could simply replace it with a pickle that rehydrates to null or throws an exception if you ever resume this flow after a restart. I think replacement with null is preferable since in most cases you did not really need the object to be saved and the flow could have continued without it.