Intellij IDEA 2017.2 cannot resolve symbol

1
votes

In Intellij IDEA 2017.2, I am trying to import an existing multi-module Maven project which builds fine outside the IDE via Maven. When the import is complete, I noticed that in one of the Maven submodules, a symbol is unresolved, lets call this submodule submodule-problem. The unresolved symbol is a class that is defined in another submodule, lets call that submodule-other. The thing is that in submodule-problem, other classes defined in other submodules at the level of submodule-other are found ok(those submodules are defined as dependencies in the pom file of submodule-problem). Furthermore, submodule-other isn't declared as a dependency in submodule-problem's pom file. But I should NOT have to do this because as I mentioned mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true works fine. So does mvn test-compile. I am using the latest Maven 3.5.0 and have instructed IDEA to use the same for the said imported project in the project's Maven settings. Note: I don't have permission to show the code or concerned POM files.

Things I've tried to resolve the issue so far are:

  1. Invalidate caches and restart IDEA, many times
  2. Re-import as Maven project, many times
  3. Delete the .idea folder and all *.iml files from the said project and re-import as Maven project, a few times
  4. Delete IDEA's system preferences folder and retry all previous steps again many times (this step was painful as I had to install all my plugins and configure IDE setting over again)
  5. Imported the same project into Eclipse-Oxygen and saw that it doesn't have any issues with the importing of the project.
1
javamavenintellij-idea
Try 2017.2.1: confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IDEADEV/IDEA+2017.2+EAP. - CrazyCoder
Did you declare all modules in your parent pom's <modules> section? - ggradnig
@ggradnig Yes. All concerned modules are declared in the parent's pom's <modules> section. - Anonymous Human
You write that submodule-other is not a direct dependency of submodule-problem. Did you try adding it as a direct direct dependency to see if this works? - Christoph Böhme
@CrazyCoder I just tried it. Same issue. - Anonymous Human

1 Answers

1
votes

I have solved the problem. It turns out that it wasn't any problem with the IntelliJ IDEA IDE (at least I think not). In production, my top level project is a child project of another parent Maven project and so it's version in it's pom file references the parent's version using ${project.version}. Whereas in development it IS the parent with the lower level projects being it's own children. So in all pom.xml files, where ${project.version} was being used by my top level project to refer to the production parent and also in the children poms where they were referring to my top level project as their parent, I changed it to something like a literal like 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT and all problems went away, I didn't even have to re-import the project into the IDE.

Now, as I mentioned in the original post, even without having to do this, Maven had no problem building the project. I'd love to know why if anyone knows. Perhaps the IDE needs me to do this because it is trying to enforce some best practice? I was led to the solution by watching idea.log where it complained about some POMs being invalid and indeed in those pom files the version tag had a red squiggly underline.