JetBrains Rider 2023.3 Help

Code Inspection: Member can be made protected (non-private accessibility)

JetBrains Rider is smart enough to determine where a particular class member is actually being used. If it isn’t used outside the type or derived types, JetBrains Rider will offer to mark the member as private. If the member is used in derived classes too, JetBrains Rider will offer to mark it as protected.

Note that these recommendations need to be considered before being automatically applied. After all, you may be creating a public API, or you may be making types intended to be accessed in non-standard ways (for example, reflection). In this case, constraining visibility might not be a good idea. If necessary, you can always suppress the inspection.

For the solution-wide inspection to work, you need to enable at least one of the following:

  • Simplified global usage checking: select Show unused non-private type members when solution-wide analysis is off on the Editor | Inspection Settings page of JetBrains Rider settings Ctrl+Alt+S.

  • Solution-wide analysis: select Enable solution-wide analysis on the Editor | Inspection Settings page of JetBrains Rider settings Ctrl+Alt+S.

Note that even if the reported member has no direct usages in your solution, there could be cases where it is used indirectly — for example, via reflection — or it could just be designed as public API. In all those cases you would want to suppress the usage-checking inspection for the member in one of the following ways:

Last modified: 21 March 2024