maven "cannot find symbol" message unhelpful

This is a bug in the Maven compiler plugin, related to JDK7 I think. Works fine with JDK6.

update to 3.1 :

  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.1</version>
    <configuration>
        <source>1.7</source>
        <target>1.7</target>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

In my case the problem was in a child jar which was not rebuilt since I have added a new class, pom.xml of that child jar was not related to my failed pom.xml as child-to-parent relation (using <parent> tag). So I rebuilt the child jar after which the error had gone.

I had the same problem. The reason was that I had two JAR files were not added through the Maven dependency, so when I ran mvn compile, the console display the error error:

Symbol cannot be found,Class...".

To fix it:

1. Remove the JAR files from build path
2. Add to build path
3. Run mvn compile

In my case, I was using a dependency scoped as <scope>test</scope>. This made the class available at development time but, by at compile time, I got this message.

Turn the class scope for <scope>provided</scope> solved the problem.