14.16 Using Slice Checksums

As described in Section 4.20, the Slice compilers can optionally generate checksums of Slice definitions. For slice2cs, the ‑‑checksum option causes the compiler to generate checksums in each C# source file that are added to a member of the Ice.SliceChecksums class:

namespace Ice {
    public sealed class SliceChecksums {
        public readonly static SliceChecksumDict checksums;
    };
}

The checksums map is initialized automatically prior to first use; no action is required by the application.

In order to verify a server’s checksums, a client could simply compare the dictionaries using the Equals function. However, this is not feasible if it is possible that the server might be linked with more Slice definitions than the client. A more general solution is to iterate over the local checksums as demonstrated below:

Ice.SliceChecksumDict serverChecksums = ...
foreach(System.Collections.DictionaryEntry e
        in Ice.SliceChecksums.checksums) {
    string checksum = serverChecksums[e.Key];
    if (checksum == null) {
        // No match found for type id!
    } else if (!checksum.Equals(e.Value)) {
        // Checksum mismatch!
    }
}

In this example, the client first verifies that the server’s dictionary contains an entry for each Slice type ID, and then it proceeds to compare the checksums.