Transient field is not initialized on deserialization

Reports transient fields that are initialized during normal object construction, but whose class does not have a readObject method.

As transient fields are not serialized they need to be initialized separately in a readObject() method during deserialization.

Any transient fields that are not initialized during normal object construction are considered to use the default initialization and are not reported by this inspection.

Example:

  class Person implements Serializable {
    transient String name = "Default"; //warning, can actually be a null after deserialization
    transient String surname; //null is considered the default value and not reported
  }

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.

TransientFieldNotInitialized

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 | Serialization issues

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 TransientFieldNotInitialized

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