Managing an oroGen package

Creating and Adding a new oroGen Package to the Workspace

This is covered in the Workspace and Packages section

The workflow of the component scaffolding tool rock-create-orogen is a bit different, though, so let's go through its workflow. Let's assume we want to create a planning/orogen/sbpl package, the workflow would be to:

acd
cd planning/orogen/
rock-create-orogen sbpl
cd sbpl
# Edit sbpl.orogen
rock-create-orogen
# Fix potential mistakes and re-run rock-create-orogen until there are no errors
# …

What does rock-create-orogen do ? orogen does "private" code generation in a .orogen subfolder of the package, and creates a templates/ folder. rock-create-orogen ensures that the initial repository commit does not contain any of these. If you don't want to use git, or if you're confident that you know which files and folder to commit and which to leave out, the second run is not neeeded.

Once this is done, add the package to your build configuration

Updating an oroGen package

Whenever you modify the orogen specification, just run the build once for that package. It will update existing C++ definitions transparently, allowing the code completion to update as well (if you use one)

Some changes in the orogen specification require manual changes to the C++ code, but they are rare (and will be documented in the relevant sections). In this case, orogen always create a "clean" version of the C++ code in the templates/ folder, giving you a template of the signature(s) you need to add or update.

Behind the scenes the C++ definitions for the component interface are separated in a base class. This base class is saved in the hidden .orogen/ folder. This is how the orogen code generation can update it without interfering with your code.

C++ Standard

The C++ standard used to interpret the data type files and to build the component's C++ code is the latest standard that its dependencies require. There is currently no way to explicitely tell orogen to use a different standard. For instance, if your oroGen project uses a library that sets C++11 using the Rock CMake macros, the oroGen project will use C++11 too.

Dealing with Dependencies

There really are three types of dependencies to oroGen packages, which have different types of requirements. In all these cases, you must remember to add the dependency's package in the orogen package's manifest.xml.

  1. dependencies between orogen packages. They are required to refer to existing task contexts and types.

  2. dependencies to libraries that are required during code generation. This is only the dependencies that are needed to define types used on the component's interfaces (see this section).

  3. dependencies that are required for the implementation of the component's code and are present in the component's public interface (that is, its .hpp file)

  4. dependencies that are required for the implementation of the component's code itself, but are not part of its public interface.

Dependencies between oroGen packages

These dependencies are used to either re-use types from another oroGen package, or refer to other task contexts implemented in another oroGen package.

Dependencies for type definitions

This is covered in the "Importing types" page

Dependencies to libraries that are used in the public interface

It is mandatory that this type of dependency defines a pkg-config file. All Rock packages do, but 3rd party libraries may not. If they do not, you will have to follow this step-by-step to work around these.

Once the new pkg-config file is installed, you can refer to it with using_library as described here. If the project does not use this library to import types, you may provide typekit: false to reduce linking and startup times: using_library 'pkg', typekit: false

Dependencies to libraries that are not used in the public interface

The simplest way to integrate these libraries, if they do provide a pkg-config file, is to use using_library (see point above).

Now, since these libraries are not needed by orogen itself, nor do they need to be exported to the orogen package's own pkg-config file, it is possible to manually handle the dependency in the package's CMake code (in tasks/CMakeLists.txt), thus avoiding the need to manually create a pkg-config file if there is none.