Intellij IDEA can not resolve symbol with Play framework

Well I am using "IntelliJ Idea 13" and doing "sbt" Playframework project with "Activator". After everything tried, I finally solved this issue with following steps in terminal/cmd at my existing root sbt project

1. enter this command in terminal/cmd : sbt clean
2. then delete these files and folders : ".idea", "all _.iml files" , "all target folders reside in project folder(this may not be necessary but I did it.)"
3. enter this command in terminal/cmd: sbt idea
4. now in IntelliJ : open project

Note: If you are building the Playframework project with "Play" command instead of "Activator" instead of sbt idea command you can try play idea or play "idea with-sources=yes"

Hope this will help you.

These steps work for me: add following lines to your plugins.sbt file:

resolvers += "sbt-idea-repo" at "http://mpeltonen.github.com/maven/"
addSbtPlugin("com.github.mpeltonen" % "sbt-idea" % "1.2.0")
but if you don't know the correct version of sbt-idea then use this instead:
addSbtPlugin("com.github.mpeltonen" % "sbt-idea" % "latest.integration")

Warning - It will take too much time to build as it need to parse all the version and get the latest version.

Run this command -

sbt gen-idea

I had a similar problem when testing my controller. I solved it by "File" > "Open Project" and choose the base folder of the Play framework project (delete all idea settings file from the folder before so that it will reimport using the SBT settings).

The last version of the SBT support for IDEA did 90% of the work. Then F4 to enter module settings dialog. Set up your project dependencies like in the picture below (the bright red folder have been set by IDEA and do not exist yet in my project so do not worry if they do in yours). It is a matter of including managed classes and generated code in the code that idea will use and index.

now I can use code like this from within IDEA and debug it no problem.

Result result = Helpers.callAction(controllers.routes.ref.CrudController.createEntity(CrudEntities.contact.name()),
        new FakeRequest().withJsonBody(paramJson)
);

your way of doing it should work as well.