uORB graph: broken links for multi-topics

[jlecoeur]

On uORB Graph, you are redirected to the topic definition when double clicking on a topic. For example, a double-click on vehicle_rates_setpoint redirects to vehicle_rates_setpoint.msg. That is really helpful.

However this does not work with multi topics.

For example, a double-click on mc_virtual_rates_setpoint redirects to mc_virtual_rates_setpoint.msg (which does not exists), when it should redirect to vehicle_rates_setpoint.msg because mc_virtual_rates_setpoint has the same message definition as vehicle_rates_setpoint.

FYI @bkueng Should metadata be generated along with uORB code (or the generated uORB code be more explicit) when a topic is actually a multi topic, so that it can be detected when generating the graph?

[bkueng]

There's a TODO for that here: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/blob/master/Tools/uorb_graph/create.py#L566. The difficulty is that the graph script does not know anything about the .msg files, and does not depend on any output of the generator script, it just extracts the topic names from source. To know about multi-topics, the script will need this additional information from the message files in one way or another. I haven't looked into that, what the best solution would be.

[jlecoeur]

Although it would require renaming most existing multi-topics, I think enforcing a specific format for multi-topic names would be the simplest solution. And could also enhance readability of the code ("where can I find the message definition for this topic?")

Something like: name_of_topic__postfix

example: vehicle_rates_setpoint vehicle_rates_setpoint__virtual_mc