How to use custom messages in tools outside bazel ecosystem?

[thomasegriffith]

How does one make use of custom messages within tools that are outside of the bazel ecosystem? Say I want to view a custom message in rviz or rqt or the ros-installed ros2 topic echo... is that possible? Thanks!!

[mvukov]

Hi! Off the top of my head, I think you would need somehow to export (symlink?) custom msgs from your Bazel workspace to a colcon workspace and handle them in colcon-standard way.

[thomasegriffith]

That makes sense. Thanks!

[thomasegriffith]

For vis: I did the steps below in a bash script, and now both ros2 topic echo and ros2 bag record work without issue.

1. copy all msg and srv files to some folder in /tmp
2. copy a package.xml and CMakeLists.txt into that folder (I used the ones for std_msgs as a template; just changed the package name)
3. cd into the new folder
4. colcon build it
5. source the install/setup.bash from the temp workspace