Using ROOT with C++ to write and read a file

Last updated on 2024-12-16 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

Why do I need to use ROOT?
How do I use ROOT with C++?

Objectives

Write a ROOT file using compiled C++ code.
Read a ROOT file using compiled C++ code.

Why ROOT?

HEP data can be challenging! Not just to analyze but to store! The data don’t lend themselves to neat rows in a spreadsheet. One event might have 3 muons and the next event might have none. One event might have 2 jets and the next event might have 20. What to do???

The ROOT toolkit provides a file format that can allow for efficient storage of this type of data with heterogenous entries in each event. It also provides a pretty complete analysis environment with specialized libraries and visualization packages. Until recently, you had to install the entire ROOT package just to read a file. The software provided by CMS to read the open data relies on some minimal knowledge of ROOT to access. From there, you can write out more ROOT files for further analysis or dump the data (or some subset of the data) to a format of your choosing.

Interfacing with ROOT

ROOT is a toolkit. That is, it is a set of functions and libraries that can be utilized in a variety of languages and workflows. It was originally written in C++ and lends itself nicely to being used in standard, compiled C++ code.

However, analysts wanted something more interactive, and so the ROOT team developed CINT, a C++ interpreter. This gave users an iteractive environment where they could type of C++ code one line at a time and have it executed immediately. This gave rise to C++ scripts that many analysts use and in fact the sample ROOT tutorals are almost exclusively written as these C++ scripts (with a .C file extension). Because they are written to run in CINT, they usually do not need the standard C++ include statements that you will see in the examples below.

With the rise of the popularity of python, a set of Python-C++ bindings were written and eventually officially supported by the ROOT development team, called PyROOT. Many analysts currently write the code which plots or fits their code using PyROOT, and we will show you some examples later in this exercise.

What won’t you learn here

ROOT is an incredibly powerful toolkit and has a lot in it. It is heavily used by most nuclear and particle physics experiments running today. As such, a full overview is beyond the scope of this minimal tutorial!

This tutorial will not teach you how to:

Make any plots more sophisticated than a basic histogram.
Fit your data
Use any of the HEP-specific libraries (e.g. TLorentzVector)

OK, where can I learn that stuff?

There are some great resources and tutorials out there for going further.

The official ROOT Primer. The recommended starting point to learn what ROOT can do.
The official ROOT tutorials This is a fairly comprehensive listing of well-commented examples, written in C++ scripts that are designed to be run from within the ROOT C-interpreter.
ROOT tutorial (2022).. Tutorial from offical ROOT project for summer students.
Efficient analysis with ROOT. This is a more complete, end-to-end tutorial on using ROOT in a CMS analysis workflow. It was created in 2020 by some of our CMS colleagues for a separate workshop, but much of the material is relevant for the Open Data effort. It takes about 2.5 hours to complete the tutorial.
ROOT tutorial from Nevis Lab (Columbia Univ.). Very complete and always up-to-date tutorial from our friends at Columbia.

ROOT terminology

To store these datasets, ROOT uses an object called TTree (ROOT objects are often prefixed by a T).

Each variable on the TTree, for example the transverse momentum of a muon, is stored in its own TBranch.

Source code for C++ lessons

There’s a fair amount of C++ in this lesson and you’ll get the most out of it if you work through it all and type it all out.

However, it’s easy to make a mistake, particularly with the Makefile. We’ve made the the source code available in this tarball. Just follow the link and click on the Download button or download it directly with wget to you working directory cms_open_data_root in your local bash terminal with:

BASH

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cms-opendata-workshop/workshop2022-lesson-cpp-root-python/gh-pages/data/root_and_cpp_tutorial_source_code.tgz

Untar the file with:

BASH

tar -zxvf root_and_cpp_tutorial_source_code.tgz

It will create a directory called root_and_cpp_tutorial_source_code with the files in it.

Write to a file

Let’s create a file with name write_ROOT_file.cc using our preferred editor. We’ll call this file write_ROOT_file.cc and it will be saved in the cms_open_data_root directory.

As in our last example, we first include some header files, both the standard C++ ones and some new ROOT-specific ones.

CPP

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

#include "TROOT.h"
#include "TTree.h"
#include "TFile.h"
#include "TRandom.h"

Note the inclusion of TRandom.h, which we’ll be using to generate some random data for our test file.

Next, we’ll create our main function and start it off by defining our ROOT file object. We’ll also include some explanatory comments, which in the C++ syntax are preceded by two slashes, //.

CPP

int main() {

    // Create a ROOT file, f.
    // The first argument, "tree.root" is the name of the file.
    // The second argument, "recreate", will recreate the file, even if it already exists.
    TFile f("tree.root","recreate");

    return 0;
}

Now we define the TTree object which will hold all of our variables and the data they represent.

This line comes after the TFile creation, but before the return 0 statement at the end of the main function. Subsequent edits will also follow the previous edit but come before return 0 statement.

CPP

    // A TTree object called t1.
    // The first argument is the name of the object as stored by ROOT.
    // The second argument is a short descriptor.
    TTree t1("t1","A simple Tree with simple variables");

For this example, we’ll assume we’re recording the missing transverse energy, which means there is only one value recorded for each event.

We’ll also record the energy and momentum (transverse momentum, eta, phi) for jets, where there could be between 0 and 5 jets in each event.

This means we will define some C++ variables that will be used in the program. We do this before we define the TBranches in the TTree.

When we define the variables, we use ROOT’s Float_t and Int_t types, which are analogous to float and int but are less dependent on the underlying computer OS and architecture.

CPP

   Float_t met; // Missing energy in the transverse direction.

   Int_t njets; // Necessary to keep track of the number of jets

   // We'll define these assuming we will not write information for
   // more than 16 jets. We'll have to check for this in the code otherwise
   // it could crash!
   Float_t pt[16];
   Float_t eta[16];
   Float_t phi[16];

We now define the TBranch for the met variable.

CPP

    // The first argument is ROOT's internal name of the variable.
    // The second argument is the *address* of the actual variable we defined above
    // The third argument defines the *type* of the variable to be stored, and the "F"
    // at the end signifies that this is a float
    t1.Branch("met",&met,"met/F");

Next we define the TBranches for each of the other variables, but the syntax is slightly different as these are acting as arrays with a varying number of entries for each event.

CPP

    // First we define njets where the syntax is the same as before,
    // except we take care to identify this as an integer with the final
    // /I designation
    t1.Branch("njets",&njets,"njets/I");

    // We can now define the other variables, but we use a slightly different
    // syntax for the third argument to identify the variable that will be used
    // to count the number of entries per event
    t1.Branch("pt",&pt,"pt[njets]/F");
    t1.Branch("eta",&eta,"eta[njets]/F");
    t1.Branch("phi",&phi,"phi[njets]/F");

OK, we’ve defined where everything will be stored! Let’s now generate 1000 mock events.

CPP


    Int_t nevents = 1000;

    for (Int_t i=0;i<nevents;i++) {

        // Generate random number between 10-60 (arbitrary)
        met = 50*gRandom->Rndm() + 10;

        // Generate random number between 0-5, inclusive
        njets = gRandom->Integer(6);

        for (Int_t j=0;j<njets;j++) {
            pt[j] =  100*gRandom->Rndm();
            eta[j] =  6*gRandom->Rndm();
            phi[j] =  6.28*gRandom->Rndm() - 3.14;
        }

        // After each event we need to *fill* the TTree
        t1.Fill();
    }

    // After we've run over all the events, we "change directory" (cd) to the file object
    // and write the tree to it.
    // We can also print the tree, just as a visual identifier to ourselves that
    // the program ran to completion.
    f.cd();
    t1.Write();
    t1.Print();

The full write_ROOT_file.cc should now look like this:

Full source code file for write_ROOT_file.cc

CPP

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

#include "TROOT.h"
#include "TTree.h"
#include "TFile.h"
#include "TRandom.h"

int main() {

   // Create a ROOT file, f.
   // The first argument, "tree.root" is the name of the file.
   // The second argument, "recreate", will recreate the file, even if it already exists.
   TFile f("tree.root", "recreate");

   // A TTree object called t1.
   // The first argument is the name of the object as stored by ROOT.
   // The second argument is a short descriptor.
   TTree t1("t1", "A simple Tree with simple variables");

   Float_t met; // Missing energy in the transverse direction.

   Int_t njets; // Necessary to keep track of the number of jets

   // We'll define these assuming we will not write information for
   // more than 16 jets. We'll have to check for this in the code otherwise
   // it could crash!
   Float_t pt[16];
   Float_t eta[16];
   Float_t phi[16];

   // The first argument is ROOT's internal name of the variable.
   // The second argument is the *address* of the actual variable we defined above
   // The third argument defines the *type* of the variable to be stored, and the "F"
   // at the end signifies that this is a float
   t1.Branch("met",&met,"met/F");

   // First we define njets where the syntax is the same as before,
   // except we take care to identify this as an integer with the final
   // /I designation
   t1.Branch("njets", &njets, "njets/I");

   // We can now define the other variables, but we use a slightly different
   // syntax for the third argument to identify the variable that will be used
   // to count the number of entries per event
   t1.Branch("pt", &pt, "pt[njets]/F");
   t1.Branch("eta", &eta, "eta[njets]/F");
   t1.Branch("phi", &phi, "phi[njets]/F");

   Int_t nevents = 1000;

   for (Int_t i=0;i<nevents;i++) {

       // Generate random number between 10-60 (arbitrary)
       met = 50*gRandom->Rndm() + 10;

       // Generate random number between 0-5, inclusive
       njets = gRandom->Integer(6);

       for (Int_t j=0;j<njets;j++) {
           pt[j] =  100*gRandom->Rndm();
           eta[j] =  6*gRandom->Rndm();
           phi[j] =  6.28*gRandom->Rndm() - 3.14;
       }

       // After each event we need to *fill* the TTree
       t1.Fill();
   }

   // After we've run over all the events, we "change directory" to the file object
   // and write the tree to it.
   // We can also print the tree, just as a visual identifier to ourselves that
   // the program ran to completion.
   f.cd();
   t1.Write();
   t1.Print();
   
   return 0;
}

Because we need to compile this in such a way that it links to the ROOT libraries, we will use a Makefile to simplify the build process.

Create a new file called Makefile in the same directory as write_ROOT_file.cc and add the following to the file. You’ll most likely do this with the editor of your choice.

MAKEFILE

CC=g++

CFLAGS=-c -g -Wall `root-config --cflags`

LDFLAGS=`root-config --glibs`

all: write_ROOT_file

write_ROOT_file: write_ROOT_file.cc
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o write_ROOT_file.o write_ROOT_file.cc
    $(CC) -o write_ROOT_file write_ROOT_file.o $(LDFLAGS)

Warning! Tabs are important in Makefiles!

Makefiles have been around a long time and are used for many projects, not just C/C++ code. While other build tools are slowly supplanting them (e.g. CMake), Makefiles are a pretty tried and true standard and it is worth taking time at some point and learning more about them.

One frustrating thing though can be a Makefile’s reliance on tabs for specific purposes. In the example above, the following lines are preceeded by a tab and not four (4) spaces.

MAKEFILE

   $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o write_ROOT_file.o write_ROOT_file.cc
   $(CC) -o write_ROOT_file write_ROOT_file.o $(LDFLAGS)

If your Makefile has spaces at those points instead of a tab, make will not work for you and you will get an error.

You can now compile and run your compiled program from the command line of your my_root container shell!

BASH

make write_ROOT_file
./write_ROOT_file

Output from write_ROOT_file

OUTPUT

******************************************************************************
*Tree    :t1        : A simple Tree with simple variables                    *
*Entries :     1000 : Total =           51536 bytes  File  Size =      36858 *
*        :          : Tree compression factor =   1.35                       *
******************************************************************************
*Br    0 :met       : met/F                                                  *
*Entries :     1000 : Total  Size=       4542 bytes  File Size  =       3641 *
*Baskets :        1 : Basket Size=      32000 bytes  Compression=   1.12     *
*............................................................................*
*Br    1 :njets     : njets/I                                                *
*Entries :     1000 : Total  Size=       4552 bytes  File Size  =        841 *
*Baskets :        1 : Basket Size=      32000 bytes  Compression=   4.84     *
*............................................................................*
*Br    2 :pt        : pt[njets]/F                                            *
*Entries :     1000 : Total  Size=      14084 bytes  File Size  =      10445 *
*Baskets :        1 : Basket Size=      32000 bytes  Compression=   1.29     *
*............................................................................*
*Br    3 :eta       : eta[njets]/F                                           *
*Entries :     1000 : Total  Size=      14089 bytes  File Size  =      10424 *
*Baskets :        1 : Basket Size=      32000 bytes  Compression=   1.30     *
*............................................................................*
*Br    4 :phi       : phi[njets]/F                                           *
*Entries :     1000 : Total  Size=      14089 bytes  File Size  =      10758 *
*Baskets :        1 : Basket Size=      32000 bytes  Compression=   1.26     *
*............................................................................*

Your numbers may be slightly different because of the random numbers that are generated.

After you’ve run this, you can look in this directory (ls -ltr) and see if you have a new file called tree.root. This is the output of what you just ran.

Huzzah! You’ve successfully written your first ROOT file!

Will I have to `make` my analysis code?

Maybe!

If you prefer to write your end-level analysis code in C++, your make setup will be very similar to this exercise
If you are analyzing AOD or MiniAOD data and using CMSSW software, a configuration and build system called SCRAM is used for this purpose of compiling and linking code.
If you only analyze NanoAOD samples and do so in python (see the upcoming lesson pages!), then you will not use make

Read a ROOT file

Let’s try to read the tree.root file now. We won’t do much with but we’ll try to understand the process necessary to read in all the data and loop over this event-by-event.

You will now edit (with your favourite editor) a file called read_ROOT_file.cc. In this file, you’ll add the following code.

We’ll start with the basic include statements and the main program.

CPP

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

#include "TROOT.h"
#include "TTree.h"
#include "TFile.h"
#include "TRandom.h"

int main() {

    return 0;
}

In the main function, we’ll define the input file.

CPP

   // Here's the input file
   // Without the 'recreate' argument, ROOT will assume this file exists to be read in.
   TFile f("tree.root");

We’ll make use of the built-in member functions to TFile to pull out the TTree named t1. There’s a few other things to note.

First, we’re going to assign it to a local variable named input_tree. This is to emphasize that t1 is just a string that refers to the name of the object stored in the TFile and that we can assign it to any variable name, not just one named t1.

The second thing to note is that we are going to create a pointer to input_tree, which makes some of the memory management easier. This means that we precede our variable name with an asterix *, we have to cast the object pulled out of the TFile as a TTree pointer (TTree*), and subsequent uses of input_tree will access data members and member functions with the -> operator rather than a period ..

If you want to learn more about pointers, there are many, many, resources out there.

CPP

   // We will now "Get" the tree from the file and assign it to
   // a new local variable.
   TTree *input_tree = (TTree*)f.Get("t1");

Just as we did in the write_ROOT_file.cc example, we will define some local variables. These variables will actually get “filled” by the ROOT file when we loop over the events.

CPP

   Float_t met;
   Int_t njets;
   Float_t pt[16];
   Float_t eta[16];
   Float_t phi[16];

We’ll now assign these local variables to specific TBranches in input_tree. Note that we’ll be using the address of each local variable when we precede the variable name with an ampersand &.

CPP

   // Assign these variables to specific branch addresses
   input_tree->SetBranchAddress("met", &met);
   input_tree->SetBranchAddress("njets", &njets);
   input_tree->SetBranchAddress("pt", &pt);
   input_tree->SetBranchAddress("eta", &eta);
   input_tree->SetBranchAddress("phi", &phi);

We’re ready now to loop over events! Each time we call input_tree->GetEntry(i), it pulls the ith values out of input_tree and “fills” the local variables with those values.

CPP

  for (Int_t i=0;i<nevents;i++) {

       // Get the values for the i`th event and fill all our local variables
       // that were assigned to TBranches
       input_tree->GetEntry(i);

       // Print the number of jets in this event
       printf("%d\n", njets);

       // Print out the momentum for each jet in this event
       for (Int_t j=0; j<njets; j++) {
           printf("%f, %f, %f\n", pt[j], eta[j], phi[j]);
       }
   }

The final version of your read_ROOT_file.cc should look like this:

Full source code file for read_ROOT_file.cc

CPP

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

#include "TROOT.h"
#include "TTree.h"
#include "TFile.h"
#include "TRandom.h"

int main() {

  // Here's the input file
  // Without the 'recreate' argument, ROOT will assume this file exists to be read in.
  TFile f("tree.root");

  // We will now "Get" the tree from the file and assign it to
  // a new local variable.
  TTree *input_tree = (TTree*)f.Get("t1");

  Float_t met; // Missing energy in the transverse direction.

  Int_t njets; // Necessary to keep track of the number of jets

  // We'll define these assuming we will not write information for
  // more than 16 jets. We'll have to check for this in the code otherwise
  // it could crash!
  Float_t pt[16];
  Float_t eta[16];
  Float_t phi[16];

  // Assign these variables to specific branch addresses
  input_tree->SetBranchAddress("met", &met);
  input_tree->SetBranchAddress("njets", &njets);
  input_tree->SetBranchAddress("pt", &pt);
  input_tree->SetBranchAddress("eta", &eta);
  input_tree->SetBranchAddress("phi", &phi);

  // Get the number of events in the file
  Int_t nevents = input_tree->GetEntries();

  for (Int_t i=0;i<nevents;i++) {

      // Get the values for the i`th event and fill all our local variables
      // that were assigned to TBranches
      input_tree->GetEntry(i);

      // Print the number of jets in this event
      printf("%d\n",njets);

      // Print out the momentum for each jet in this event
      for (Int_t j=0; j<njets; j++) {
          printf("%f, %f, %f\n", pt[j], eta[j], phi[j]);
      }
  }

  return 0;
}

Now we need to modify our Makefile to compile this code. We edit it so that it looks like this.

MAKEFILE

CC=g++

CFLAGS=-c -g -Wall `root-config --cflags`

LDFLAGS=`root-config --glibs`

all: write_ROOT_file read_ROOT_file

write_ROOT_file: write_ROOT_file.cc
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o write_ROOT_file.o write_ROOT_file.cc
    $(CC) -o write_ROOT_file write_ROOT_file.o $(LDFLAGS)

read_ROOT_file: read_ROOT_file.cc
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o read_ROOT_file.o read_ROOT_file.cc
    $(CC) -o read_ROOT_file read_ROOT_file.o $(LDFLAGS)

clean:
    rm -f ./*~ ./*.o ./write_ROOT_file
    rm -f ./*~ ./*.o ./read_ROOT_file

We can now compile and run the code!

BASH

make read_ROOT_file
./read_ROOT_file

We get a lot of output! However it should look something like the following, keeping in mind your numbers will be different because of the random numbers that make up the values.

Output of read_ROOT_file

OUTPUT

1
85.105431, 5.602912, 0.501085
1
18.954712, 4.375443, -1.546321
1
39.784435, 5.165263, 2.592412
3
80.748314, 0.387768, 1.786288
52.971573, 3.939434, 2.484405
12.969198, 3.115963, 0.910543
3
93.604256, 0.737315, -0.647755
86.382034, 3.493269, -1.573663
68.181541, 3.658454, -1.206015
3
96.990395, 5.839735, 3.046098
79.096542, 4.515290, 0.039709
83.234497, 4.990829, 2.586360
4
60.880657, 1.233623, -2.837789
25.723198, 4.751074, 2.355202
20.403908, 4.656353, -2.171340
18.961079, 1.425917, 2.016828

Awesome! You’ve now written and read in a very simple ROOT file! There is obviously much more that can be done, but this should give you the basics of interfacing with ROOT TFiles and TTrees.

You’ll see some version of this code when using analyzers to run over the open data code. At that point, you can write out subsets of the data to new ROOT files or even simply dump the data to a text or .csv file.

In the next section, we’ll take a quick look at how to read in a file and make a few histograms, still using the C++ syntax.

Key Points

ROOT defines the file format in which all of the CMS data is stored.
These files can be accessed quickly using C++ code and the relevant information can be dumped out into other formats.

Using ROOT with C++ to write and read a file

Overview

Questions

Objectives

Why ROOT?

Interfacing with ROOT

What won’t you learn here

OK, where can I learn that stuff?

ROOT terminology

Source code for C++ lessons

BASH

BASH

Write to a file

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

Full source code file for write_ROOT_file.cc

CPP

MAKEFILE

Warning! Tabs are important in Makefiles!

MAKEFILE

BASH

Output from write_ROOT_file

OUTPUT

Will I have to make my analysis code?

Read a ROOT file

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

CPP

Full source code file for read_ROOT_file.cc

CPP

MAKEFILE

BASH

Output of read_ROOT_file

OUTPUT

Key Points

Will I have to `make` my analysis code?