eguiraud

Many thanks to Alberto for his amazing work on a ROOT file viewer for VS Code I know a few ROOT developers that are already using it Read all about it here or in the original post on our website.

Wile_E_Coyote

For me, there are two problems with the new toy.

1. When VS Code works in one of the “SSH TARGETS” in the “Remote Explorer”, it doesn’t seem to be able to browse remote ROOT files at all (well, at least I wasn’t able to get it working).

2. It is only well suited for simple / flat ntuples which use ordinary C++ data types. It does not really understand C++ classes, including ROOT’s own classes, so it “flattens” all available data. Assume that you have a “TTree” which keeps some “objects”. Take a simple “TVector3” and all three coordinates are mixed together (and there is no way to draw, e.g., the “X()” or the “Mag()”).

Well, ROOT provides a standalone tool (needs the python feature): rootbrowse
Without python, you can simply execute (e.g., create a shell alias): root -e "TBrowser b"
Of course, you do need a working ROOT binary distribution for them … but if you work on ROOT related source code, you anyhow must have it on your “target machine”.
These standard ROOT executables do understand all standard ROOT classes, and if your ROOT files use some nonstandard ones, you can simply load the corresponding shared libraries to be able to inspect them.

1 reply

bellenot

You need to install ROOT to use rootbrowse, while you don’t need ROOT to use the VS Code plugin…

Axel

Yeah this is more: say I’m coding my analysis, need to enter that branch name, what was that again? And here, thanks to this plugin, it’s all part of the IDE: I can browse ROOT files, trees, see histograms, and adjust the code appropriately. That’s the beauty!

enpg_qz

Excellent job, thanks!

xtovo

Nice!
I’m trying to build it from github sources
… but node_modules dir is missing
Is it OK? (I’m newbie with VScode extensions)

AlbertoPdRF

Hey!

First of all, thanks everyone for the kind words! The support that the extension has received so far has been awesome

@xtovo: how are you trying to build it? After clonning the repository, running yarn && yarn run compile from the base folder should do it. Feel free to reach out to me if you have problems or something is not clear enough!

xtovo

Thanks. It’s OK.
I found “vscode:prepublish”: “yarn run compile” in package.json

I’m newbie with VScode extensions and on the learning curve.

• where dependency on the node_modules located?
  … oops. I found it’s in package.json
  “dependencies”: {
  “jsroot”: “^6.0.1”
  }
  Does it mean node_modules (jsroot) should be registered in globally-installed JavaScript tools?
  Does it mean that “yarn cache-folder” contains all globally-installed JavaScript tools?
  It could be huge! in the future
  If it’s so, useful to set “yarn cache-folder” on non-system disk,
  like this yarn config set cache-folder d:\yarn
• can you add “build from scratch” instructions?

1 reply

AlbertoPdRF

I just added the basic instructions to build and run the extension locally to the README, please check it out at GitHub - AlbertoPdRF/root-file-viewer: View ROOT files directly in VS Code!

The node_modules folder contains all the dependencies of a given project – there’s no need for these dependencies to get installed globally. Of course, this means that you can have several installations of the same library on your system, but this way it’s ensured that you always have the correct version of each one installed for each project. As you point out, these folders can grow huge, so a good practice (IMHO) is to delete them when you are not working on a project anymore, as installing all the dependencies again is quite straight forward if you need to

xtovo

Thanks.
Is it possible to extend this extension to run ROOT macro from inside VS code?
See the following scenario:

• edit hsimple.C macro
• press F5 to run macro or “Run->Start Debugging”
  which invoke root.exe -l -q hsimple.C
• after macro execution a new tab is created with hsimple.root content

ROOT allows to set breakpoints inside a macro and step-by-step execution,
so it would be good to add key bindings:

• F9 - toggle breakpoint
• F10 - step execution

I also want to have possibility compile, compile&execute macro.

1 reply