fix: circular ref guard

[Gavin Barron (gavinbarron)]

Pull Request

Description

improved circular ref detection

Type of Change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to not work as expected)
• Documentation update
• Other (please describe):

Related Issue(s)

Changes Made

improved parsing perf

Testing

• Unit tests added/updated
• Integration tests added/updated
• Manual testing performed
• All existing tests pass

Checklist

• My code follows the code style of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation
• My changes generate no new warnings
• I have added tests that prove my fix is effective or that my feature works
• New and existing unit tests pass locally with my changes

Versions applicability

• My change applies to the version 1.X of the library, if so PR link:
• My change applies to the version 2.X of the library, if so PR link:
• My change applies to the version 3.X of the library, if so PR link:
• I have evaluated the applicability of my change against the other versions above.

See the contributing guidelines for more information about how patches are applied across multiple versions.

Additional Notes

[github-code-quality]

Code Coverage Overview

Languages: C#

C# / code-coverage/dotnet

The overall coverage in commit 419868b in the fix/circular-ref-gua... branch remains at 89%, unchanged from commit e0d5e9d in the main branch.

Show a code coverage summary of the most impacted files.

File	main e0d5e9d	fix/circular-ref-gua... 419868b	+/-
/home/runner/wo...erenceHolder.cs	100%	95%	-5%
/home/runner/wo...nApiDocument.cs	89%	89%	0%
/home/runner/wo...ackReference.cs	45%	45%	0%
/home/runner/wo...pleReference.cs	67%	67%	0%
/home/runner/wo...derReference.cs	80%	80%	0%
/home/runner/wo...inkReference.cs	69%	69%	0%
/home/runner/wo...ypeReference.cs	79%	79%	0%
/home/runner/wo...terReference.cs	82%	82%	0%
/home/runner/wo...temReference.cs	65%	65%	0%
/home/runner/wo...TagReference.cs	65%	74%	+9%

---

_{Updated August 19, 2026 03:05 UTC}

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
2 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
90.4% Coverage on New Code
0.8% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud