libraries shouldn't write to stdout about ros_type_introspection

[facontidavide]

I agree with you.
A possible solution is that we add one more argument to that function as std::ostream

std::ostream might output to null, std::cout, std::cerr or a std::string, so the user can choose.

Does it make sense in your opinion?

[facontidavide]

Take a look to this change. Does it make sense in your opinion?

0425418

[facontidavide]

For instance, I'm mostly interested in only parsing the Header and not the entire message.

I would say that there is no way to do this. You should implement your own version of buildRosFlatType to do that

[ibtaylor]

I'm not sure yet. Can you explain the reason for max_array_size? Is it intended to purposefully ignore certain large arrays or something?

[facontidavide]

Exactly. The main reasoning is that the key/value storage will create a pair for each BuiltIn element.
if someone pass an Image with 1M pixels, the result would be 1M key-value pairs.

Most of the time you want to ignore this very large vectors. You can also use an arbitrarily large number, of course.

if you want to SAVE only a part of the message, for example the Header, you can actually do it, but you need to implement a recursive function very similar to buildRosFlatType.

[facontidavide]

I introduced a solution in the PR 11

055e579