========================================================= Geant4 - an Object-Oriented Toolkit for Simulation in HEP ========================================================= ExampleP01 ---------- General description ------------------- This example shows how to store produced hits in a file using the 'reflection' technique for persistency provided by the Reflex tool also included in ROOT. The Reflex tool allows to create a dictionary for the hit class, making then possible to save hit objects in a .root file. The general simulation setup (geometry, physics list, user actions, etc...) is taken from ExampleN02. The provided makefile produces two executables: 'persEx02' and 'readHits'. The first one is the actual Geant4 simulation application with hits persistency. The second one, is just a simple 'reader' for the produced .root file (you need to specify the name of the .root file as argument). Building and running the example -------------------------------- Before buidling and/or running the example you need to set the following environment variables: ROOTSYS - ROOT installation directory, it is required to run ROOT GCCXMLPATH - gccxml binary directory, it is needed by ROOT for the dictionary generation LD_LIBRARY_PATH - to include the ROOT library path and the path to the dictionary library, i.e., for tcsh UNIX shell: setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:$ROOTSYS/lib: $G4WORKDIR/tmp/$G4SYSTEM/exampleP01 The present version of the example requires that Geant4 headers are installed in a single directory referenced by G4INCLUDE, as the standard Geant4 installation procedure allows to do. Once those variables are set (together with the standard Geant4 setup) the example can be build by issueing the 'make' command. The final executable file can be found in the usual directory: $G4WORKDIR/bin/$G4SYSTEM/ Ten events will be generated and the produced hits will be stored in the hits.root file. In addition, the hits will be printed out on the screen so one can then compare them with the 'reader' output. In order to read the persistified hits, a small 'reader' application has been implemented. It is build by the same makefile as the example executable. It can be run in the following way: readHits hits.root where the argument is the name of the file to be read. All the hits saved in that file will be then read and printed on the screen. Remark on dictionary generation ------------------------------- The dictionary is generated by ${ROOTSYS}/bin/genreflex tool. The header file including headers for all the classes we want to generate the dictionary for should be given as argument. Additionally, a so called selection file (xml) should be provided (with -s flag) to the genreflex tool (see the GNUmakefile). The role of this file is to specify which classes we want to generate the dictionary for. The selection file for our dictionary is in xml/ directory. Please refer to genreflex manual for more details concerning the usage of that tool. Concerning generating dictionary for the Geant4 objects, there are also two technical remarks that need to be made here. The gccxml tool (version 0.6.0_patch1) requires all the templated classes to be explicitely used somewhere in the included header files in order for the generation of the dictionary to be possible. For those templated classes for which it is not the case, the problem can be very easily solved by instaciating them in the headerfile which is given to genreflex (see includes/Classes.h) as argument. The second remark is that there is an unfortunate clash of names as far as G4String class is concerned. The header of G4String class defines __G4String which happens to be the name of a variable used within the generated dictionary code. The solution for that is to do #undef __G4String in include/Classes.h file.