maven cannot find symbol message unhelpful

Question

This is a really simple question  and it s probably a setting somewhere I don t know about  but Google is being particularly unhelpful for this question  giving results about compilation errors  not how to change compilation error messages   When I build my project with maven  it will give me error messages formatted roughly as follows    ERROR   path to source Main java  13 8  error  cannot find symbol  When I build with ant or javac  it will actually tell me the symbol that it can t find in the error message   maven gives me a line number and character position  but displaying the actual symbol would be more helpful   The line above is the only line given for each of the  cannot find symbol  errors   There is no line above or below that gives the symbol   I imagine there has to be some way to get maven to tell me that information  but I don t know what it is   I tried the -e option  as mvn told me to try using it  but it gave a maven traceback for the error  not the actual symbol   Any help   Here s the output of mvn --version  Apache Maven 3 0 4  rNON-CANONICAL 2012-10-24 11-25 mockbuild  2012-10-24 07 25 04-0400  Maven home   usr share maven Java version  1 7 0 09-icedtea  vendor  Oracle Corporation Java home   usr lib jvm java-1 7 0-openjdk-1 7 0 9 x86 64 jre Default locale  en US  platform encoding  UTF-8 OS name   linux   version   3 6 6-1 fc17 x86 64   arch   amd64   family   unix    And here s an example  unhelpful  error message  exactly as output by maven  just with directories shortened     INFO  -------------------------------------------------------------  ERROR  COMPILATION ERROR     INFO  -------------------------------------------------------------  ERROR   path to source SoundEngineFilePanel java  33 8  error  cannot find symbol  ERROR   class SoundEngineFilePanel  path to source SoundEngineFilePanel java  36 8  error  cannot find symbol  INFO  2 errors   INFO  -------------------------------------------------------------   The symbols it can t find are  fakeThing  and  fakeThing2   not SoundEngineFilePanel

User · Answer

update to 3 1       lt plugin gt       lt groupId gt org apache maven plugins lt  groupId gt       lt artifactId gt maven-compiler-plugin lt  artifactId gt       lt version gt 3 1 lt  version gt       lt configuration gt           lt source gt 1 7 lt  source gt           lt target gt 1 7 lt  target gt       lt  configuration gt   lt  plugin gt

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My guess the compiler is complaining about an invalid annotation  I ve noticed that Eclipse doesnt show all errors  like a comma at the end of an array in a annotation  But the standard javac does

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This is a bug in the Maven compiler plugin  related to JDK7 I think  Works fine with JDK6

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SOLUTION     Before building your component  using mvn clean install   Build the entire project once and build your component again  WHY SO   I get this error many times  Most of the times I will try to build my component alone  As I have not made changes elsewhere     Right  But that extra jar which has been downloaded recently might have affected by changes done by a third party inside their component   Making a full mvn clean install on entire project saved me many times

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Even I am using Java 7  maven 2 2 1 and was getting the same error  I removed  lt scope gt tests lt  scope gt  from my pom and used   mvn clean -DskipTests true install to successfully build my projects  without upgrading my maven version

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In my case the problem was in a child jar which was not rebuilt since I have added a new class  pom xml of that child jar was not related to my failed pom xml as child-to-parent relation  using  lt parent gt  tag   So I rebuilt the child jar after which the error had gone

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Generally  this error will appear when your compile code s version is different from your written code s   For example  write code that rely on xxx-1 0 0 jar that one class has method A  but the method changed to B in xxx-1 1 0 jar  If you compile code with xxx-1 1 0 jar  you will see the error

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if you are having dependency on some other project  in work space and these projects are not build properly  such error might come  try building such dependent projects first  it may help

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If you are using Intellij and the above solutions are not working try  File  gt  Invalidate Caches   Restart This worked for me  Sometimes when you are working through multiple branches  the IDE uses its cache and cannot find the file in the cache hence it shows error during compilation

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Perhaps you should check your IDE case sensitive properties  I had the same problem  and solved it by making Idea case-sensitive  for my filesystem is case sensitive   https   confluence jetbrains com display IDEADEV Filesystem Case-Sensitivity Mismatch

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I was getting a similar problem in Eclipse STS when trying to run a Maven install on a project  I had changed some versions in the dependencies of my pom xml file for that project and the projects that those dependencies pointed to  I solved it by running a Maven install on all the projects I changed and then running install on the original one again

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This occurs because of this issue also i e repackaging which you defined in POM file   Remove this from pom file under maven plugin  It will work   lt executions gt       lt execution gt           lt goals gt                lt goal gt repackage lt  goal gt           lt  goals gt       lt  execution gt   lt  executions gt

User · Answer

I had the same problem  The reason was that I had two JAR files were not added through the Maven dependency  so when I ran mvn compile  the console display the error error      Symbol cannot be found Class        To fix it    Remove the JAR files from build path Add to build path Run mvn compile

User · Answer

This is not a function of Maven  it s a function of the compiler  Look closely  the information you re looking for is most likely in the following line

User · Answer

I had the same issue with maven  It happens that my problem was  maven was generating the folders with differenc case names  I was expecting a  service MyFile but in the target folder it was Service MyFile and java is a case sensitive  It took me a few hours to find out  recommend you to check it out

User · Answer

In my case  I was using a dependency scoped as  lt scope gt test lt  scope gt   This made the class available at development time but  by at compile time  I got this message   Turn the class scope for  lt scope gt provided lt  scope gt  solved the problem

[java] maven "cannot find symbol" message unhelpful

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