Class references one of its subclasses

Reports classes which contain references to one of their subclasses. Such references may be confusing and violate several rules of object-oriented design.

Example:

  class Entity {
    // Warning: the class references its subclass
    void compare(SimpleEntity entity) {
      ...
    }
  }
  class SimpleEntity extends Entity {
    ...
  }

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.

ClassReferencesSubclass

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.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Java | Abstraction issues

Inspection ID: ClassReferencesSubclass

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 ClassReferencesSubclass

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

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, Qodana for JVM 2025.3,

Last modified: 03 December 2025