Today I met a strange issue when I was opening a Gradle project with multiple subprojects in IntelliJ IDEA.

First, after I clone the code from Github, as the “build.gradle” file shows, I run the following command to create IDEA project files:

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gradle cleanIdea
gradle idea

They work properly. And the IDEA project files(both the root project and the subprojects) are created successfully.

But the problem is, when I open this project in IDEA, IDEA cannot recognize the project structure, which means no source code navigation, no libraries downloaded.

I cannot find anything wrong.

After a while, I read this and this.

Then I realize the problem might be caused by “one of the sub-project has the same name as the root project directory“. So I update the “build.gradle” file:

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{
    ...

    idea {
        module {
            // Add the following line to give an explict root project name, rather than
            // the default one as the root directory name "yarn-submitter", which has
            // duplicated name as one of its sub-project.
            name = 'yarn-submitter-parent'
        }
    }
}

After that, IDEA can open the whole project properly.

The lesson learn here is, never use one name for two different things. And I don’t know why they are named so. I also think IDEA should have a better warning or error message for such problem, instead of showing nothing.