search

osrf / vrx

Virtual RobotX (VRX) resources.
Apache License 2.0
416 stars 188 forks source link

suppress unused fields in params message? #617

Closed M1chaelM closed 1 year ago

M1chaelM commented 1 year ago

Because of some challenges introduced by the way we use protobufs, it is difficult to create custom messages in VRX 2.0 and above. As a consequence, we rely heavily on the "params" message. A drawback is that this message is very noisy and ros2 topic echo commands produce output that is hard to read without instrumentation.

The situation would be much better if there were an easy way to suppress unused fields in the param message. For example, in the following entry from the range_bearing topic for the acoustic pinger, only 2 fields are really relevant:

- name: range
  value:
    type: 3
    bool_value: false
    integer_value: 0
    double_value: 21.468399037071904
    string_value: ''
    byte_array_value: []
    bool_array_value: []
    integer_array_value: []
    double_array_value: []
    string_array_value: []

If we could display only the name and double_value fields this message would be much more human-friendly. I'm creating this issue as a reminder to check what options might be available.

M1chaelM commented 1 year ago

Closing this per discussion. There is not a currently supported way to suppress unused fields (except by filtering through another program). The plan is to wait for custom message support to improve, then restore our custom messages.