Telling IntelliJ IDEA which methods not to identify as unused

Question

IntelliJ IDEA has a handy feature to detect unused methods and show them in grey, hinting a potential warning for dead code.

Some methods, however, are not executed directly but via reflection. A good example would be @RequestMapping-annotated methods which are executed by Spring. IntelliJ has decent Spring integration hence it detects this annotation and does not mark such a method as unused.

I have a tiny AJAX framework where I use my own annotation to point which method to execute based on certain HTTP request properties (very similar to what @RequestMapping is doing). Understandably, IntelliJ has no idea what does my annotation stand for and and marks such a method as unused, adding unnecessary noise.

I was thinking of:

• annotating my annotation with another annotation, but are there any standard ones that would do the job without any extra effort?
• finding a particular setting in IntelliJ to identify custom annotation for marking methods as used, but this would require other team members to do the same, basically a pain.

Can anyone suggest any ideas how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You can tell IntelliJ to not to warn about used for any method/field annotated with the annotation the "unused" method has.

It should be a quick fix all you have to do is hit <Alt>+<Enter> and select Suppress for methods annotated by ...

You don't need to add anything to you code and you only have to do this once per annotation.