Make Intellij Your Second Brain

This month’s Java Magazin had an interesting article about Four common pitfalls of the BigDecimal class and how to avoid them. Curious if I had made such a potential mistake in the past, I opened my java playground project. A code search for BigDecimal.valueOf( found many occurrences. Having a closer look at the results, it turned out that some of them used a double argument. So I was looking for a way to not make these potential mistakes again.

I had a look at IntelliJ’s inspections and as it turns out, there is an inspection for the ambiguous constructor call, but not for the factory method. I recently read about Structural Search and Replace in IntelliJ and figured that I’ve a use-case for this feature here.

Navigate to Preferences -> Editor -> Inspections and click on the + icon to add a new replace template.

The problematic code we’re looking for has the form of BigDecimal.valueOf(x) where x is of type double. In the form field Search Template we use java.math.BigDecimal.valueOf($parameter$) and with the cursor places on parameter, add a filter.

As type, specify double.

As Replace Template I’ve chosen new java.math.BigDecimal("$parameter$"), which isn’t perfect, but might work just well enough in some cases.

From now on, IntelliJ warns me like this: