Maven clean install: cannot find symbol

Question

My Maven clean install is failing. Below is the error message.

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal
org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin:2.0.2:compile
(default-compile) on project MyProject: Compilation failure:
Compilation failure:

[ERROR] C:\..\MyClass.java:[13,2] cannot find symbol

[ERROR] symbol  : class MyAnnotation

[ERROR] location: class mypackage.MyClass

MyClass.java

public class MyClass{

    @MyAnnotation
    public static class MyAnnotation{
        //some static nested class code here...
    }

MyAnnotation.java

@Retention (RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface MyAnnotation{
} 

I have no clue why this would present problems, can anyone please give me some ideas?

Solution 1

Found the problem...

I apologize as I didn't include enough code for anyone to determine the root cause of the issue, normally I don't include import statements in my posts but this time I should have. The below class is a more full example. As we can see, the below class declares a static import to an object that resides in the static nested class (within the same .java file). While this is not illegal from a compilation standpoint, it was causing issues in my Maven clean install. I'm still not %100 sure why maven does not like this, but this fashion of static importing doesn't really make sense to begin with. To fix this, I removed the static import and substituded a normal static call (MyAnnoation.someObject) wherever the static import was being used.

package com.classes;

import static com.classes.MyClass.MyAnnotation.someObject;

public class MyClass{

     @MyAnnotation
     public static class MyAnnotation{

     public static final Object someObject = new Object();

}

Again, my apologies for not providing the static import details in my original post, hopefully someone finds this helpful.

Solution 2

Did your maven-compiler-plugin is using 1.5. By default it used 1.4 and annotations are introduced in 1.5