Code Inspections

Severity levels of Code Inspections

All ReSharper code inspections as well as structural search and replace patterns have one of the following severity levels:

Error

Code inspections that have the 'Error' severity level by default are aimed at code issues that either prevent your code from compiling or result in runtime errors. Most of these inspections are not configurable, i.e. you cannot disable them or change their severity level.

In design-time inspection, ReSharper displays unresolved symbols in red:

and highlights erroneous statements or part of them with a red curly underline:

If there is at least one error in the current file, the status indicator displays the Error icon, and red markers are shown for each error on the marker bar.

Code issues that are found with inspections having the 'Error' severity level, appear in the Errors/Warnings in Solution window if the solution-wide analysis is enabled.

Warning

This severity level corresponds to compiler warnings and to other issues that do not prevent your code from compiling but may nevertheless represent serious coding inefficiencies. For example, ReSharper informs you about redundant type casts or namespace import directives, incorrect format strings, declared but never used local variables or private fields, unused private methods, etc.

In design-time inspection, ReSharper displays redundant symbols with greyed text:

and highlights statements or part of them with a blue curly underline:

If there is at least one warning in the current file, the status indicator displays the Warning icon, and yellow markers are shown for each warning on the marker bar.

Warnings also appear in the Errors/Warnings in Solution window if the solution-wide analysis with warnings is enabled

Suggestion

Code issues with this severity level provide insights into code structure, drawing your attention to things that aren't necessarily bad or wrong, but probably useful to know.

For instance, you might be interested to know that 'parameter can be declared with base type', meaning that your method only uses members of the parameter's base type. This can be an indication of a different error, such as failure to take into account the specifics of the actual parameter type. Based on this knowledge, you may want to change the parameter's type - or not, if that is by design.

In design-time inspection, ReSharper highlights suggestions with a green curly underline:

and adds green markers for each warning on the marker bar.

Hint

This is the lowest severity level. Code issues with this severity simply bring your attention to a particular code detail and/or recommends a way of improvement.

In design-time inspection, ReSharper highlights hints by adding a dashed green underline to the initial two letters of the corresponding symbol:

Unlike errors, warnings and suggestions, hints are not taken into account when you navigate between code issues in the editor, and not shown in the marker bar.

Note that when you set the caret over a highlighted hint, no pop-up is shown, the corresponding message only appears in the status bar.

Severity levels of most code inspections (except those detecting compiler errors) can be changed, i.e. you can define severity levels for each code inspection according to your needs.

When you inspect code in specific scope, ReSharper adds corresponding icons to the detected issues and allows sorting issues by the severity level in the Inspection Results window.

Categories of Code Inspections

ReSharper groups configurable code inspections by several categories. These categories roughly define purposes of inspections and kinds of code issues that they detect. The categories are used to group code inspections on the Code Inspection | Inspection Severity page of ReSharper options, and to group code issues found in specific scope and displayed in the Inspection Results window.

• Potential Code Quality Issues
  This category includes inspections that detect critical issues (code smells), mostly with Error or Warning level. This category also includes inspections that ensure localization assistance.
• Common Practices and Code Improvements
  This category groups inspections that hunt for medium severity issues that mainly affect code readability.
• Redundancies in Code
  Code inspections in this category look for redundancies and dead code, which affect code readability and style, and could be safely removed. Some code redundancies cannot be fixed automatically, and quick-fixes for them are performed in the interactive mode, requiring the user input. But the majority of the redundancies can be fixed without user interaction, using either fix in scope or code cleanup.
• Language Usage Opportunities
  This category includes code inspections, mostly with the suggestion severity level, which notify you when more advanced language constructs can be used. These inspections detect syntax of outdated language versions and suggest using features from more modern language versions. For most of the supported languages, language version can be detected automatically or set manually.
• Code Notifications
  This category groups code inspections with minor severity levels.
• Code Style
  Inspections in this category detect violations of code style rules. In contrast to the rest of code inspections, these inspections can either detect the same code construct as a code issue or not depending on the corresponding code style rule configured in the Code Editing | [Language] | Code Style pages of ReSharper options. You can also fix issues that these inspection detect, using code cleanup. For more information, see Code Style and Cleanup.
• Constraints Violations
  This category includes code inspections, mostly with the warning severity level, which detect violations related to symbol attributes, including ReSharper's code annotations, and other similar issues.
• Redundancies in Symbol Declaration
  This category includes code inspections, mostly with the warning severity level, which detect empty and unused symbol declarations.
• Compiler Warnings
  Inspections in this section detect compiler warnings before you compile.
• NUnit
  These inspections detect code issues related to NUnit tests.