ELK integration not working

[jcunliffe1]

copied plantuml and elk-full jars to folder and pointed plugin to it, then got:

https://plantuml.com/de/elk
https://github.com/plantuml/ELK-demo

[krasa]

does it work from command line?

[jcunliffe1]

yep - the demo project works

[jcunliffe1]

maybe make it low prio - it's not that great yet

[alersrt]

Despite this is in Alpha stage, it's still important part of PlantUML project and allows to get much more better results in some cases.

[SirNoName2705]

I have found a Workaround. I could not get it to work using my own plantuml jar. But if you start plantuml -picoweb:8000:127.0.0.1 with your own installation and then link the url in the plugin settings it works.

I have renamed the old installation to plantuml_old.jar.

Normally you would get the elk-full.jar from this website: https://plantuml.com/de/elk
But it would not download for me.
If you have the same problem go to: http://beta.plantuml.net/
And then download it manually.

I do not know why this is still a "Beta" feature. Because Elk is so much better that it makes plantuml even viable for using in my project. Without it, you cannot read complex diagrams that are auto-generated.

[SirNoName2705]

I just realized that then the export feature for tikz etc. will not work.
I do not understand why the plugin will show that error even if I add the elk-full.jar in the same directory where the plantuml.jar is located. Even if I put it in the plugin directory.

I hope this will be addressed soon. I really like the plugin.

[StephanPirnbaum]

PlantUML v1.2024.6 added a dependency to Elk. However, Elk diagrams are still not working in this plugin although it uses v1.2024.7. When using the bundled jar, it shows a ClassNotFoundException for Elk classes, so I believe transitive dependencies are not packaged in this plugin. When using the EPL distribution from https://plantuml.com/de/download the InvocationTargetException arises.

Are there plans to fix this?

[ahus1]

I tried to make the AsciiDoc plugin for IntelliJ work with ELK, and I found that the exception is caused by a service loader mechanism that won't work in a hierarchical class loader setup.

See eclipse-elk/elk#1109 for a proposed fix. It might be possible to manually register the layout until a ELK fix is released. That manual registration would probably need to land in PlantUML.

Once I started to build a JAR with the fix, it started to work: https://github.com/ahus1/elk-patched-for-plantuml