If statement with too many branches

Reports if statements with too many branches. Such statements may be confusing, and are often the sign of inadequate levels of design abstraction.

Example:

if (a) {
  print "foo"
} else if (b) {
  print "bar"
} else if (c) {
  print "baz"
} else if (d) {
  print "Too many branches"
}

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.

GroovyIfStatementWithTooManyBranches

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 | Groovy | Control flow issues

Use the Maximum number of branches field to specify the maximum number of branches expected.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the If statement with too many branches inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Maximum number of branches: Default value:
3

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 GroovyIfStatementWithTooManyBranches

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