Why so red? IntelliJ seems to think every declaration/method cannot be found/resolved

Question

IntelliJ sometimes gets confused all by itself, even without the external changes Korgen described (though that is a good way to consistently reproduce it).

Click File -> Synchronize, and IntelliJ should see that everything is okay again.

If that doesn't work, IntelliJ's caches might be corrupt (this used to happen a lot more often than it does now); in that case, regenerate them by

Clicking File -> Invalidate Caches and restarting the IDE

(though loading the project will take a while while the caches are recreated).

I experienced this when I updated my JDK manually and removed the previous JDK

Solution

• In the IntelliJ editor, click on the red keyword (Integer for example) and press ALT + ENTER (or click the light bulb icon)
• select Setup JDK from the intentions menu

• click on Configure

• In my case, the JDK path was incorrect (pointed on /opt/jdk1.7.0_51 instead of /opt/jdk1.7.0_65)

• Click on the ... and browse to the right JDK path

• Let's clear the cache:

And everything should be back to life :)

IntelliJ sometime gets confused after importing maven projects and then changing poms externally or generating sources outside IntelliJ.

You might want to try a maven->force reimport from within intellij on the project root

I had the same problem after changing JDK from 1.6 to 1.7 in my pom.xml and setting Maven 3 path + JDK project settings to 1.7.

What did it for me was => File -> Invalidate Caches and Restart

PS: problem occured again, so i just reimported the full project after deleting the .idea folder and now it works fine as usual :)

In my case, getter and setter dependencies were coming through lombok plugin (Using java with Spring). And in the new installation of intellij idea, I had not installed the lombok plugin. Installing the lombok plugin fixed it for me.

If you're still getting this error, even after you've tried all the other suggestions on this question, you have checked all your JDK, Maven settings, invalidated cache, synchronized your workspace and restarted, but things still aren't working for you, then go to your project directory and delete the entire .idea folder. Restart your IntelliJ; all the files under .idea will be created freshly which reflects the current situation.

At least, this worked for me.