Allow file attachments to a bag

[chriser-]

We have a topic that publishes data (position, acceleration, ...) and we want to extract this data to a csv file.

It would be nice if we could add file attachments to a bag through scripts, which can then be downloaded via the bag information window.

[pjreed]

I agree, this sounds useful. Adding a way to attach files to a bag together with a widget for viewing them would probably also make it easy to implement #102 . I'll have to think a bit about a good way to implement actually storing the files; off the top of my head, I think it'd be useful to be able to attach files through the GUI, add them via a script, or read them from disk at the same time a bag file is added to the filesystem.

In the meantime, technically a script can return anything you want and it will be saved, although binary data might break the result viewer, and anything that's not JSON won't have pretty formatting. A workaround for storing binary data might be to base64-encode it and then store it as a string in JSON output...

[ansgri]

That would be a good addition indeed. Currently our workaround for this and #123 (reported by my colleague) is to save files in a parallel file tree and viewing them manually (and optionally tagging with the path to that data), and it would be very useful to be able to e.g. return a file path or URL or even b64-encoded data and have the GUI recognize it in the bag info, allowing downloading or viewing (for images).