Unnecessarily qualified inner class access

Reports any references to inner classes that are unnecessarily qualified with the name of the enclosing class.

Such a qualification can be safely removed, which sometimes adds an import for the inner class.

Example:

  class X {
     X.Y foo;
     class Y{}
  }

After the quick-fix is applied:

  class X {
     Y foo;
     class Y{}
  }

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.

UnnecessarilyQualifiedInnerClassAccess

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 | Code style issues

Use the Ignore references for which an import is needed option to ignore references to inner classes, where removing the qualification adds an import.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Unnecessarily qualified inner class access inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Ignore references for which an import is needed: Default value:
Not selected

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 UnnecessarilyQualifiedInnerClassAccess

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