IntelliJ inspection gives Cannot resolve symbol but still compiles code

Question

Platform  IntelliJ Community Edition 10 0 3 SDK  jdk1 6 0 21 OS  Windows 7  So I have a strange situation with IntelliJ that has me completely stumped   I setup a Maven project and add log4j as a dependency in the pom xml file   The IDEA inspections run fine and my unit tests all compile and run   I then added hunnysoft s jmime library to my local maven repository using the mvn install install-file as follows   mvn install install-file -Dfile jmime jar -DgroupId jmime   -DartifactId jmime -Dversion 3 1 1e -Dpackaging jar   Maven installed the jar file just fine into my local repository   I then went into IntelliJ s Settings    Maven    Repository Services and Updated my local repository  so that IntelliJ would reindex the repository contents    Finally  I added the following dependency to my pom xml file  just above the log4j dependency     lt dependency gt       lt groupId gt jmime lt  groupId gt       lt artifactId gt jmime lt  artifactId gt       lt version gt 3 1 1e lt  version gt   lt  dependency gt    I now create a new class as follows   package com stackoverflow question   import org apache log4j Logger  import com hunnysoft jmime ByteString  import com hunnysoft jmime Field  import com hunnysoft jmime FieldBody   public class StackOverflowQuestion       public Field create String name  String text            Logger getLogger getClass    debug  create entered            FieldBody body   new FieldBody            body setText new ByteString text            Field field   new Field            field setFieldName name           field setFieldBody body           return field            Now for the weirdness   IntelliJ s intention mechanism picks up and recognizes the Logger import in the maven pom file just fine   However  for all of the hunnysoft imports it reports   Cannot resolve symbol  ByteString Field FieldBody    BUT Build    Compile  StackOverflowQuestion java  compiles everything correctly and the unit test I created for this class runs fine  though the intentions mark the call to create   as a problem area too    So somewhere  somehow IntelliJ is ignoring the jmime jar file for the intention subsystem   I m confused because the log4j dependency works fine and everything compiles and runs fine   F12   Go To Declaration   works on the Logger import  but breaks on all the jmime imports   Oh  one other thing  if I go to the  Packages  view in the  Projects  window the  com hunnysoft jmime  package appears and I can see ALL of the classes I imported in the code snippet above under  Libraries    Removing the above dependency from the pom xml file causes this package to disappear and the compilation breaks   It appears that the inspection s classpath is broken  but there does not seem to be a setting for this anywhere in the Settings    Intentions   Compiler areas  not that I expected any such settings  I believe the IDEA should already know the correct classpath based on the pom file and JDK    As a final experiment I created a brand new standard J2SE application project  without using maven  and added the jmime jar file directly to the project as one of its libraries   I run into exactly the same problems as described above in this new project   Here is the MANIFEST MF from the jmime jar file   Manifest-Version  1 0 Ant-Version  Apache Ant 1 5 4 Created-By  10 0-b23  Sun Microsystems Inc    Name  com hunnysoft jmime  Sealed  true Specification-Title  Hunny JMIME Specification-Version  3 1 1 Specification-Vendor  Hunny Software  Inc  Implementation-Title  com hunnysoft jmime Implementation-Version  3 1 1E Implementation-Vendor  Hunny Software  Inc    I don t see anything unusual in this jar file   My best guess is that perhaps the problem might be a missing dependency issue   But AFAIK jmime is supposed to be self contained  JarAnalyzer doesn t come up with anything  but I m not sure it would if a dependency jar is missing    So  anyone have any IDEAs

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Remove the  iml file found in java and test folders inside the project and  invalidate and restart      It will ask can I remove the projects   Put Yes  The error will goes off

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For Gradle projects    Exit IntelliJ IDEA Delete the  lt problematic-project-root gt   idea directory Delete the  lt problematic-project-root gt   gradle directory Delete all  iml files in  lt problematic-project-root gt    windows command prompt  DEL  S  Q   iml linux  find     grep -e  iml    xargs rm  Re-import the project into IntelliJ IDEA with Gradle

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First of all you should try File   Invalidate Caches and if it doesn t help  delete IDEA system directory  Then re-import the Maven project and see if it helps   In some weird cases compiled classes may report wrong info and confuse IDEA  Verify that the classes from this jar report correct names using javap

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For Ivy users and and IntelliJIdea2020 xx If nothing helps for the already answered  Close IntelliJ and delete completely the folder   C  Users  username  AppData Local JetBrains IntelliJIdea2020 xx Restart IntelliJ project and it should resolve the previous not correctly loaded dependencies

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For another alternative   I got this problem also when I used JDK7 07  I tried all answers here  except deleting IDEA System Directory   But  I still got the problem  So what I did it is   Install newest JDK  it was JDK7 45   and set the Intellij s JDK to the new one  and it works

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In my case  I am trying to open a spring boot project from IntellijIdea got the same issue like unable to import all spring related files   Then I did      File -  Close Project -  Import Project -  Import from external model -  Choose Gradle -  Next -  Select the project from file location -  Finish   Now everything working fine as expected   I have seen many answers here but I finally found this solution  It may use for someone like me

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One extra step  when I did File -  Invalidate Caches and restarted the IDE  open a project  It popped up a toastbox on the top-right asking me whether to enable auto-import and that solved the problem

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I just had this issue and it would just not go away  I eventually wiped out the IntelliJ config directory in   and rebuilt my IntelliJ project from scratch   This only took about 15 minutes in the end  compared to spending an hour trying to work out problems with cached files  etc    Note that my guess is that the initial problem was caused by something like javathings blogspot com 2009 11 too-many-open-files-in-intellij-idea html  NB  as of 2018  that link is dead  but archive org has a copy of the page from around when this answer was first written -ed   or a disk space memory issue causing Java to crash  IntelliJ seemed to just get corrupted

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If all my pom xml files are configured correctly and I still have issues with Maven in IntelliJ I do the following steps   Read how to use maven in IntelliJ lately Make sure IntelliJ is configured to use Bundled Maven 3 Find and TERMINATE actual java process that is executing Maven 3 repos indexing for IntelliJ Termination can be done while IntelliJ is running   In case any problems with indices or dependencies not available thought repositories were configured in pom xml   Forced Update for all repositories in  IntelliJ   Settings   Build Tools   Maven   Repositories      Takes most of the time  disk space and bandwidth  Took me 20  minutes to update index for Maven central repo  Hit Re-import all Maven project once again from IntelliJ It is a good practice to do steps 1-4 to leave IntelliJ and its demon java processes running over night  if you have multiple repositories and a complex project  so you have everything in sync for the next day  You can in theory use all popular indexed repos out there and launch index update for all repos at the same time I suppose IntelliJ creates a queue and runs updates one after another  then it can take hours to complete you will need to increase heap space for that too     P S  I ve spent hours to understand step 3  that IntelliJ s java demon process that handles maven index update was doing something wrong and I simply need to make IntelliJ to start it from scratch  Problem was solved without even restarting IntelliJ itself

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In my case  a colleague added Lombok to the project  and I had to install the Idea Lombok plug-in  In your case  it may be something else that requires a plug-in

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For Intellij Idea users this commands before even importing project might help      gradlew build   gradlew idea

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Previous answers didn t work for me  Switched from version 2020 1 to 2018 2 and things seem fine

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My Project Structure   src - gt  main - gt  scala - gt  mypackages   What worked   Right click on the scala folder  and click  Mark Directory as Sources Root

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File -  Invalidate Cache and Restart  will resolve all dependencies

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I had a similar issue when I switched to a new computer    I copied all the IDEA files  even the related  APPDATA -folders   but then the Maven build was successfully  but IDEA did not find any classes from the dependencies  when building it   The solution  I started with a new and clean IDEA profile by removing the folders from the  APPDATA -folders

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None of the other answeres worked for me  My imports were not being resolved because IntelliJ pointed to wrong  m2 file   IntelliJ Version  IntelliJ Idea 2018 1 5  My location for the  m2 directory was pointed to the wrong path  All I did to fix it was re-point IntelliJ to the right  m2 directory and update it   First  go to  File- Settings- Build  Execution  Deployment- Build Tools- Maven  I had to change the User settings file  and the Local repository  to the correct location of my  m2 directory   After this go to  File- Settings- Build  Execution  Deployment- Build Tools- Maven- Repositories  and click the Update button

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Press  shift  two times    Reimport All Maven projects  always works for me

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In my case  my project was using Lombok and I was missing the Lombok Plugin in IntelliJ  After installing it everything worked fine

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For MAVEN   I tried all of the above methods  but couldn t find the solution    So below are the steps I tried A mix of some solutions     mvn clean mvn idea clean Invalidate cache and restart Remove all the extra  iml files you see in the project structure  At the root directory of your project  run mvn idea idea and mvn clean install  to reimport all the dependencies of your maven project     Make sure you don t have extra  iml files other than the project subprojects  iml files

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check import Maven projects automatically  fixed my issue  I spent two hours figuring out where I am doing wrong  Finally was able to fix it

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Has a fixed been published  Appears issue originally affected v11 12 due to a  Compiler overhaul  back in 2013  With discussion on related issues in Jira up to end of 2014  http   youtrack jetbrains com issue IDEA-98425  Also on Jira IDEA-98425 was marked fixed but unverified  on v12 0 3   None of the following work-around helped resolve this  Unable to Resolve Symbol  issue with Version 13 1 1 on Windows   a  Delete  IdealIC13 folder  Then  File   Invalidate Caches   Restart   b  From Maven Projects window         b 1 mvn -U idea idea     Executing this maven goal suppose to reload the dependencies  This works prev  but since last FRI  executing this maven goal failed as it tried to recompile the project  Of course it fails as  Unable to resolve Symbols   that s what I am trying to fix by running this command in the first place           mvn -version     shows maven version referenced 3 2 5 and that it s working      b 2 Simply right click project  and Reimport      b 3 File   Invalidate Caches   Restart  c  Tried both Enable   amp  Disable this setting  File -  Settings -  Maven -  Importing -   Use maven3 to import project   d  Settings   Maven   Multiproject build fail policy   Fail at end  instead of Default    Nothing works  What s happenning to IntelliJ support on Maven   https   youtrack jetbrains com issue IDEA-99302  From JetBeans release history  https   www jetbrains com company history jsp  IntelliJ v14 NOV 2014  IntelliJ v13 DEC 2013  I d assume v12 fixed  although unverified  would be incorporated in subsequent releases  Any one having similar problems with which IntelliJ version  Please share your experience  IntelliJ maven support seems broken

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I tested all the solutions above and finally decided to empty my Maven repository manually  I actually deleted the  m2 folder on linux   It did the trick

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I tried invalidating cache  it didnt work for me  However  I tried removing the jdk from Platform Settings and added it back and it worked  Here s how to do it  Project Settings - gt  SDKs - gt  Select the SDK - gt  Remove  -  - gt  Add it back again

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After invalidating my cache and restarting  and confirming my maven settings were okay  I was still seeing  Cannot resolve symbol  for a module that I definitely had set as a dependency  Turns out I had it set to the wrong scope    You can check by right clicking on your module and selecting Open Module Settings  Click the dependency tab and verify that the scope for your un-resolvable dependency is set to Compile

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This seems to happen to me mostly when the dependency jar is also a Fat Jar  Fortunately I had control over the building of the Fat Jar  after making it a non Fat Jar then things just worked  None of the other fixes on any of the answers or comments here worked for me  Also probably noteworthy is that my code was in Kotlin and the Fat Jar was bundling some Kotlin dependencies as well

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What helped me to resolve this issue   I have had another branch  have switched to that branch and built the project with mvn clean install  Everything was ok  then switched back to the master and build the project again and the errors disappeared  Invalidate caches and restart didn t help me

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1 Find out the package in your pom file which can not find   2 Then delete them from your local repository   My project face this problem because one of the jar in the pom can not load properly

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I m jealous of all of you who resolved through File   Invalidate caches  I just spent hours trying everything on this question and a few others from around the web  The magic menu item didn t do it for me so I invalidated the caches myself by nuking  USERPROFILE  AppData Local JetBrains IntelliJIdea2020 3 caches Once I did this and restarted IntelliJ  2020 3   the indexes were rebuilt and my errors went away

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The number one suggestion of Invalidate Caches Restart    did not work for me nor did any of the other solutions  It ended up being that my maven repos were incorrectly set up  I fixed this by manually overriding the settings xml and repository directory   File -  Settings    -  Build  Execution  Deployment -  Build Tools -  Maven  Then for User settings file and Local repository  check the Override and point it to the correct settings xml and repository directory

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In IntelliJ IDEA 2020 3  select   File  gt  Invalidate Caches   Restart     gt  Invalidate and Restart  When prompted with Download pre-built shared indexes   don t import the shared indexes  close the dialog or choose More actions  gt  Don t show again

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Open  Settings  Search for  Maven  Click on  Ignored Files  under  Maven  Uncheck the pom xml files contains the missing dependencies Click  OK  Click File -  Invalidate Caches Restart    Click  Invalidate and Restart

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None of the solutions above worked for me  What did was removing the main iml file manually and it suddenly worked

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mvn idea idea worked for me  Found it here  Spent more than an hour  hope it helps someone

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What worked for me was to  Mark as directory source root  the directory in which the red marked class was  after it the red mark disappeared  Seems that for some reason it was unmarked

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Another thing to check  Be sure that dependencies are not duplicated  In my case I found that a module exhibiting this behavior was misconfigured as follows  it had a dependency on another module  and it had a dependency on a jar produced by that other module  This meant for every symbol referenced in duplicate  and was ambiguous

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verify successfully  my idea version is 2019 2  Quick fix  1 use maven install you dependent module then reimport all module 2 compile current module if still not found close your all idea window restart idea

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None of the above solutions solved it for me  I had the same issue where the code compiled fine but IntelliJ showed that it could not find the import  Even though IntelliJ suggested the import in the first place from code completion    My solution was to move everything to the default package  delete the com foo bar package  then create it again and move everything back

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Suggested solutions did not work  I had to unignore several projects  by right clicking on the pom    maven    unignore project   Then after a  mvn clean install -T 6 -DskipTests   in the console  IntelliJ was happy again  No idea how the projects became ignored

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For Idea 2017 1   Gradle  the plugin is somehow buggy  Tried all synchronize  invalidate   restart  nothing worked  According to https   github com gradle gradle issues 2315  this worked for me  1  Close Idea 2  Type gradle idea in command line  should generate 3 files   iml   ipr   iws  3  Run idea and open the created file  ipr  this should import your project from scratch  with hard-wired dependencies in those 3 files

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if maven project then just go to settings - build tools -  maven - importing  check the checkbox  import maven project automatically   will solve the problem

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The following trick resolved this issue for me     Right click on the code editor Hover on Maven and expand Click on Reimport   My idea version is 12 0 4

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If nothing works out  right click on your source directory   mark directory as  Source Directory  and then right click on project directory and maven -  re-import    this resolved my issue

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For Gradle users   You may need to synchronize your project with your build gradle file    You can right-click on your gradle file under the Project pane to do this  but that didn t seem to do anything for me  I suspect a bug in my version   You ll know if this happens because it wont  kick off any IntelliJ tasks that you will be waiting on  Instead  open up the Gradle Tool pane  then click the synchronize  refresh  button  This worked for me where invalidating the cache and restarting did not   My own circumstance  I was using a Scala project with Gradle and had to do this

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Invalidate Caches worked for me but after running the application had the same error   So I tried  Intellij     1 - Menu bar - Refactor   Build   Run   Tools   - click Build then Rebuild Project  2 - MVN clean  3 - Right click on project   Maven   Generate Sources and Update Folder  Hope this works for you   Thanks

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Had trouble importing standard java libraries such as java beans    Fixed it on my Redhat 7 system by pointing it to the correct JRE path   File- ProjectStructure- SDKs- 1 8 Changed  JDK home path   to  usr lib jvm java-1 8 0-openjdk-1 8 0161-2 b14 el7 x86 64 instead of  usr lib jvm java-1 8 0-openjdk-1 8 0161-2 b14 el7 4 x86 64  The former path to jdk with the  4 difference in path  hardly had anything in it   It was missing many java libraries

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Yes  sounds like you have to create libraries containing the JARs you need and add them as a dependency in your module

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Sometimes  I just open project structure  and click project  then choose a SDK version

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Re-importing the project worked for me  Right Click on Project -  Maven - Reimport  when I did File -  Invalidate Caches and restarted the IDE open a project  It showed a dialogue on the top-right  Maven changes detected  and gave an option to import and enable auto-import  Even after importing the project here  I had the same issue  The above step solved the problem

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sometimes  when you create package like com mydomain something the directory structure does not get created and you are left with a single folder named  com mydomain something  in this case you should create directory structure  like  com   mydomain     something

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If your maven project is a multi-module project  check if some of the modules are ignored by intellij    Click on View -  Tool Windows -  Maven Projects  and check if some modules are ignored Ignored modules are in grey  e g  gs-multi-module in the following image        Right click on the ignored module and choose Unignore Projects      Then wait for intellij to finish indexing  after which it will work

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This was mentioned in another answer to this same question here  but this alone fixes this for me   I do all my builds in a separate terminal  outside of IntelliJ   So the cache s need to have the proper permissions set for the IntelliJ app to read them   Run it from the project s root folder       mvn -U idea idea

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Inconsistent duplicate module names in project structure was causing this issue for me    Go to File - gt  Project Strucutre - gt  Modules In Click on modules which have red underline Got to  Dependencies  tab Make sure the dependencies which are red actually exist in dependency list  If not  rename them to match existing dependency names   This can happen when IntelliJ doesn t shut down properly and thus cannot properly save renamed module names

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Or maybe the file you import is too large this is my case when I change the Intellij property  iead max intellisen filesize  path is   idea dir  bin idea properties  to a larger value like 25000  and restart the IDE the problem disappeared  Hope this helps

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In my case  only buildDir is removed  In this case  File   Invalidate Caches does not work   When I do Build   Make Project before File   Invalidate Caches  everything works fine

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Go to File- Project Structure -  SDKs and check if your SDK file path is correct

[java] IntelliJ inspection gives "Cannot resolve symbol" but still compiles code

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