Incorrect reference to abstract bean

Reports referenced abstract beans.

Abstract beans can be used only as template bean definitions, that is, parents for child definitions. Trying to use such an abstract parent bean on its own by referring to it as a ref property of another bean, or by calling getBean() with the parent bean id, will result in an error.

Example:

  <bean abstract="true" id="parentBeanWithoutClass"/>
  <bean class="com.my.company.FooBean" id="childBean" parent="parentBeanWithoutClass">
  <!--  properties -->
  </bean>

In this example, the parent bean can't be instantiated on its own since it is incomplete and explicitly marked as abstract.

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

AbstractBeanReferencesInspection

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection AbstractBeanReferencesInspection

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025