IDE refactoring support in a Lombok project

Question

Project Lombok is tempting to reduces boilerplate code in our Java 8 code base. The downside is that it limits tool support (refactoring, static analysis).

For example, in my experiments with IntelliJ, refactoring of fields of a class annotated with @Builder, no longer works. I know of no workaround (you have to manually fix locations, where the old method name of the Builder is used).

Another example is that in Eclipse "find references" on a field does not find the references, but a good workaround is to open the outline and apply "find references" on the generated getter/setter.

My questions:

• Which refactoring features of the major IDEs (especially Eclipse, IntelliJ) does it break?
• Are there good workarounds?

Answer 1

Here's a small workaround to refactor the getter/setter of a variable in a @Data class. This works in eclipse and probably elsewhere as well:

Sample class, where we want to refactor "value" to "value2":

import lombok.Data;
@Data
public class Thing {
    int value;
}

(1) Rename (don't refactor) the variable to something temporary to remove lombak's generated getter/setter for the original name. You'll get compile errors wherever the old getter/setter were referenced, but that is temporary:

@Data
public class Thing {
    int valueXXX; // reference to getValue() are broken for the moment
}

(2) Manually create a dummy getter/setter for the old name. Your compile errors will go away now:

@Data
public class Thing {
    int valueXXX;
    public int getValue() { return 0; }
    public void setValue(int value) {}
}

(3) Use eclipse to refactor your dummy getter/setter. All references in your codebase now use getValue2() and setValue2():

@Data
public class Thing {
    int valueXXX; // 
    public int getValue2() { return 0; }
    public void setValue2(int value) {}
}

(4) Delete the renamed dummy getter/setter and change the variable name from your temporary name to the new one. Now it's all lombakized again:

@Data
public class Thing {
    int value2;
}

Admittedly this is a bit annoying, but it doesn't actually take that long and it sure beats changing hundreds of references by hand.

Answer 2

One I recently came across:

In IntelliJ (don't know about Eclipse), you can't extract an interface that includes any methods generated by lombok. They don't show up on the relevant dialog.

There is an easy workaround: Let IntelliJ create the methods, extract the interface, revert your class and have it implement the interface again.