Is there a way to return all unrefrenced objects?

Question

I have this "Linked Web"(?) data structure ie. each object has a bunch of references to other objects.

So i wrote a method that is supposed to 'remove' a passed object by removing all references to it.

I need to test it and make sure that after i run the method the particular object i want to remove is not referenced by anything else

How could I do this?

An idea would be to force a Garbage Collection then run my delete object method and then force another GC to see if it found an object.

if it found an object for deletion then I would assume that my method works but if it found nothing to collect then I would assume that something is referencing it and would have to plug that leak

Is this possible? How?

Thanks, Ryan

Answer 1

You can keep track of each object via a WeakReference and check the IsAlive property after a garbage collection.