ros2 / ros2/launch

Support for OptionalDeclareLaunchArguments

Open
#946 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
155
Forks
182
Avg merge
2d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

Description

Currently need to set default_value='foo' or get the following error.

[ERROR] [launch]: Caught exception in launch (see debug for traceback): Included launch description missing required argument 'bar' (description: 'no description given'), given: [foo]
Motivation

Basically I have parameter yaml file I'm loading. And I want to be able to override via the cli. But I can't easily have it override since the DeclareLaunchArgument gives the above error when there is no default.

Design / Implementation Considerations

Maybe some sort of subclass of DeclareLaunchArgument which is OptionalDeclareLaunchArgument which takes an action to execute if a value is passed at cli but, otherwise does nothing?

Additional Information

I got around this with making a canonical unset default but it is inelegant.

DeclareLaunchArgument('bar', default_value='__unset__')
IfCondition(PythonExpression(["'", bar, "' != '__unset__'"]))

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with DeclareLaunchArgument and the included launch-description argument validation shown in the error. Reproduce the YAML-parameter case without default_value, then compare it with the unset workaround. Done means an optional declaration can be omitted without failure while a CLI-provided value can still override the loaded parameter.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.