Multiple TTree::Draw in one loop

Hi all,

TTree::Draw has an easy to use syntax, but it loops over all event entries for each plot. For large dataset and a large number of plots, this is inefficient due to IO time, which generally trumps CPU time. One can write a macro but of course it doesn’t have the nice syntax of TTree::Draw and is more difficult to maintain, or to port from one analysis to another.

I wonder how TTree/TChain implements parsing of selection string and testing a selection on an event. I would think it should be easy to even allow filling histogram with similar functionality. I am thinking about pseudo codes like the following:

tree->SetDraw(var1,selection1,h1)
...
tree->SetDraw(var100,selection100,h100)
tree->RunDraw() //where it fills all histograms

or (if an explicit loop is needed)

for (...[getting entries]..){ 
histo1->Fill(var1,selection1);
..
histo100->Fill(var100,selection100);
}

or even just (so that there is no need to write complicated nested if structures.)
if {event->cut(selection1)} histo1->Fill(var1)

In short, is there currently an easy way to fill histograms which has the following feature:

  • simple selection string syntax
  • scalable with large number of histograms
  • (possibly) pyroot support

There were similar questions before:

TDataFrame seems to be working towards that direction, but it baffles me that it doesn’t really do string parsing like TTree::Draw. How hard is it to reuse the selection string feature?

It’d be great if someone could comment on this. Thank you in advance.

Hi,

RDataFrame supports transformations (e.g. Filter and Define) expressed as strings. These strings cannot be the same used by TTree::Draw and must be proper C++. You can see several examples here.

Cheers,
D

How hard is it to reuse the selection string feature?

It seemed to be quite hard the one time I looked into it – the string parsing is entangled with TTree-specific logic like TBranch access and so forth…but I would love to be proven wrong :slight_smile:

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