Quickfix: Using Lombok with IntelliJ causes compiler error “cannot resolve method”

Lombok is a library that reduces boilerplate code when using the Java programming language. In comparison with modern script languages such as Python or Ruby, Java tends to be overly verbose: In order to create a class with a few attributes serving as a data object, one needs to create numerous getters and setters as well as custom equals and hashCode implementations. Of course, the Java IDE landscape has reacted to this kind of problem a long time ago by equipping IDE users with several ways to generate these methods on demand.

However, maintaining such data classes can still be hassle: Just imagine a programmer quickly adding one or more attributes to a data class because a new feature needs to be implemented that relies on those. They surely will remember to generate the getters and setters because otherwise they won’t be able to access the new attributes. They might miss to update the toString method or the equals and hashCode methods, though, and what gives? All tests might pass and everything could be fine for a while. But then a bug is discovered that either might be related to the equals method not reflecting the newly added attributes that could potentially lead to overwriting data entities in collections or a crucial log message does not give a programmer the values of the added attributes because the toString method has not been updated.

Lombok deals with these problems by generating getters, setters, constructors, useful toString methods as well as equals and hashCode implementations in the build process of your app. Integrating Lombok, say, in a Gradle build, is as easy as adding

compileOnly 'org.projectlombok:lombok'

to the dependencies of your build.gradle file. Afterwards, a data class may be written as follows:

import lombok.*;

@Data
@NoArgsConstructor
@RequiredArgsConstructor
class Account {
  private @NonNull String accNumber;
  private double saldo;
}

The annotation @Data gives you getters and setters for all attributes of your class as well as a toString, a hashCode and an equals implementation. The annotations @NoArgsConstructor and @RequiredArgsConstructor give you the standard constructor as well as a constructor with all the required fields (in this case, all fields annotated as @NonNull).

Using the data class without further ado in IntelliJ might lead to a compiler error (even though the Gradle build will go through just fine): If we were to use the method setAccNumber, for instance, IntelliJ would remark that it “cannot resolve method setAccNumber“.