Rider Help

Code Syntax Style: Optional Member Qualifiers

In C#, you can qualify instance members with this keyword, and qualify static members with type name or a base type name. These qualifiers help you disambiguate members hidden by local variables or method parameters. In all other cases, these modifiers are optional, and you can decide for yourself whether to use them or not. With Rider, you can configure your preferences for using optional modifiers and enforce these preferences.

Rider helps you adjust optional member qualifiers in the existing code and takes your preferences into account when it produces new code with code completion and code generation features, applies code templates and performs refactorings.

Enforcing preferences for optional member qualifiers

By default, Rider treats all optional member qualifiers as redundant and suggests removing them.

Suggestion to remove redundant qualifier

If you prefer to use optional qualifiers, you need to specify it explicitly as described below. For example, you may prefer to qualify static methods with the type where they are declared:

Preferences for member qualifiers

As soon as you change the preferences, Rider will treat the same code differently and suggest the corresponding corrections:

Suggestion to qualify with the base type name

Another option to enforce preferences for member qualifiers in a bulk mode is code cleanup. You can either run code cleanup with the default profile Default: Full Cleanup or run the cleanup with a custom profile solely targeted at your specific task as described below.

To apply preferences for member qualifiers with custom Code Cleanup profile

  1. Press Ctrl+Alt+S, or alternatively choose File | Settings on Windows and Linux or Rider | Preferences on macOS.
  2. Go to the Code Cleanup settings page: Editor | Code Cleanup.
  3. Create a new profile as described in the Code Cleanup section. In the Selected profile settings section for the new profile, tick the Arrange qualifiers check box. Optionally, you can enable other code cleanup tasks in this profile.
  4. Click Save to apply the modifications and let Rider choose where to save them, or save the modifications to a specific settings layer using the Save To drop-down list. For more information, see layer-based settings.
  5. Select the scope where you want to enforce your preferences:
    • Set the caret anywhere in the file to enforce your preferences to the file.
    • Select one or more items in the Solution Explorer to enforce your preferences in the files under these nodes and their child items.
  6. Choose Code | Code Cleanup in the main menu.
  7. In the Code Cleanup dialog that opens, select the newly created profile.
  8. Click OK. Rider will enforce your preferences in the selected scope.

Configuring preferences of optional member qualifiers

Your member qualifiers style preferences are saved using the mechanism of layer-based settings. Among other things, this mechanism allows you to maintain different preferences for different solutions as well as to keep these preferences under a VCS and automatically share them with your team members.

To configure preferences for member qualifiers

  1. Go to the Editor | Code Style | C# page of Rider settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), and then select the Code Style tab.
  2. Modify settings in the Instance member qualification and Static member qualification categories according to your coding practices/standards.
  3. The selectors in the right column allow you to set severity levels of code inspections detecting code that differs from your preferences.
  4. Click Save to apply the modifications and let Rider choose where to save them, or save the modifications to a specific settings layer using the Save To drop-down list. For more information, see layer-based settings.
Last modified: 11 October 2017

See Also