config_utilities Tutorials

We provide detailed introductions about everything you need to know about config_utilities in the following tutorials and some verbose example demos that you can run.

Tutorials

The following tutorials will guide you through functionalities of config_utilities, from beginner to expert:

1. Overview of functionalities and headers

2. Config essentials

   • Declaring a struct a config
   • Checking for valid configurations
   • Printing configs

3. Parsing configs from data sources

   • Parse from yaml
   • Parse from the command line
   • Parse via global context
   • Parsing in ROS2

4. Handling complex configs or types

   • Sub-configs
   • Inheritance
   • Virtual configs
   • Type conversions
   • Namespaces

5. Automatic object creation via factories

   • Automatic object creation
   • Creating objects with individual configs
   • Delayed object creation with virtual configs

6. Compositing data sources

   • Compositing
   • How compositing works
   • Controlling compositing behavior
   • Substitutions

7. Advanced features

   • Adding custom types
   • Adding custom conversions
   • Adding custom checks
   • Adding custom loggers
   • Adding custom formatters
   • Adding custom parsers
   • Adding custom substitutions

8. External Plugins

   • Loading an external library
   • Managed instances
   • Debugging

9. Dynamic Configs

   • Declaring a dynamic config
   • Dynamic Config Callbacks
   • Setting Dynamic Configs
   • Custom Dynamic Config Servers

10. Debug Tools: Introspection

    • Getting Introspection data
    • Visualize the results

11. Varia

    • Settings

Demos

The (non-ros) demos can be run via the run_demo.py utility in the scripts directory. If you are building this library via catkin, you can run one of the following to see the results of one of the corresponding demo files:

python3 scripts/run_demo.py config
python3 scripts/run_demo.py inheritance
python3 scripts/run_demo.py factory

ℹ️ Note
If you're building via cmake, you can point run_demo.py to the build directory with -b/--build_path.

The ros2 demos can be run via:

ros2 launch config_utilities_ros demo_ros_dynamic_config.yaml

Note that for the dynamic config ros demo Flask is required to run the GUI:

pip install Flask

ℹ️ Note
If you are looking for a specific use case that is not in the tutorials or demos, chances are you can find a good example in the tests/ directory! Try and give it a look!