Intellij Idea 13 UI Designer and automatic Gradle building

Question

I\'ve used the Intellij UI Designer to create forms for a project. Everything works fine when I\'m building with idea as it handles compiling the forms for me, but as we rec

Answer 1

Idea 2019.2

It seems like IntelliJ changed the settings UI when updating from 2019.1 to 2019.2, as the menu entry mentioned by Tom isn't there anymore.
I got it fixed by setting Build and run using: to IntelliJ Idea. I also changed Run tests using: to IntelliJ Idea to avoid problems while testing.
Both settings are located under File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Gradle.

Answer 2

So I made this a lot more complicated than needs be.

To make it work you need to change two things in your project.

A setting in IDEA 13.1.5

Settings -> GUI Designer -> Generate GUI into: Java source code

This makes IntelliJ IDEA add 3 methods into the bottom of your forms:

• $$$setupUI$$$()
• $$$setupUI$$$()
• $$$getRootComponent$$$()

If they are missing try recompiling your project after you change the setting.

Add the missing classes

Intellij has a jar called forms_rt.jar, and I found mine in {IntelliJ IDEA Root}\lib. And renamed it to "forms_rt-13.1.1.jar"

This needs to be included during compile time to your project. If you are using Gradle as I did you could copy it to {project root}/lib and add a flatfile repository like so:

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
    flatDir dirs: "${rootDir}/lib"
}

After that you need to include it in your project gradle file:

dependencies {
    compile name: 'forms_rt', version: '13.1.1'
}

After that it should be possible to build it both in IntelliJ IDEA and Gradle.

Answer 3

The forms_rt library is in mavenCentral. http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Ca%3A%22forms_rt%22

Once you have configured IntelliJ to update the SourceCode it is sufficient to just add the library to the dependencies in your build.gradle.

dependencies {
    compile 'com.intellij:forms_rt:7.0.3'
}

Answer 4

IntelliJ IDEA 2019.1

I found this issue still exists. It's at least somehow documented now:

If your build actions are delegated to Gradle, GUI Designer will not generate Java source code.

So by disabling the according setting

Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Gradle | Runner | Delegate IDE build/run actions to gradle

I was able to build and run the project successfully. Note that I didn't need any other settings or additional libraries from the answers above. I let Generate GUI into be set to Binary class files.