C# Language Specification

Caller info attributes

For purposes such as logging and reporting, it is sometimes useful for a function member to obtain certain compile-time information about the calling code. The caller info attributes provide a way to pass such information transparently.

When an optional parameter is annotated with one of the caller info attributes, omitting the corresponding argument in a call does not necessarily cause the default parameter value to be substituted. Instead, if the specified information about the calling context is available, that information will be passed as the argument value.

For example:

using System.Runtime.CompilerServices

…

public void Log(

[CallerLineNumber] int line = -1,
[CallerFilePath] string path = null,
[CallerMemberName] string name = null
)
{
Console.WriteLine((line < 0) ? "No line" : "Line "+ line);
Console.WriteLine((path == null) ? "No file path" : path);
Console.WriteLine((name == null) ? "No member name" : name);
}

A call to Log() with no arguments would print the line number and file path of the call, as well as the name of the member within which the call occurred.

Caller info attributes can occur on optional parameters anywhere, including in delegate declarations. However, the specific caller info attributes have restrictions on the types of the parameters they can attribute, so that there will always be an implicit conversion from a substituted value to the parameter type.

It is an error to have the same caller info attribute on a parameter of both the defining and implementing part of a partial method declaration. Only caller info attributes in the defining part are applied, whereas caller info attributes occurring only in the implementing part are ignored.

Caller information does not affect overload resolution. As the attributed optional parameters are still omitted from the source code of the caller, overload resolution ignores those parameters in the same way it ignores other omitted optional parameters (§7.5.3).

Caller information is only substituted when a function is explicitly invoked in source code. Implicit invocations such as implicit parent constructor calls do not have a source location and will not substitute caller information. Also, calls that are dynamically bound will not substitute caller information. When a caller info attributed parameter is omitted in such cases, the specified default value of the parameter is used instead.

One exception is query-expressions. These are considered syntactic expansions, and if the calls they expand to omit optional parameters with caller info attributes, caller information will be substituted. The location used is the location of the query clause which the call was generated from.

If more than one caller info attribute is specified on a given parameter, they are preferred in the following order: CallerLineNumber, CallerFilePath, CallerMemberName.

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