RNTuple Validation Suite

The RNTuple Validation Suite provides conformance tests for the RNTuple Binary Format Specification. The goal is to cover all parts of the specification with implications on the format. It can be used to validate both writer and reader implementations of the RNTuple specification. To that end, each test comes with a written description of the schema and the expected data. Eventually, we will also provide a set of reference .root and .json files (see below).

Warning

The RNTuple Validation Suite is currently work-in-progress. Its structure and implementation may change during development. We welcome early feedback on the current state from any interested party.

Test Categories

Tests in the RNTuple Validation Suite are organized into (nested) categories. This is mirrored by the hierarchical directory layout in the repository. For example, the types directory contains tests related to type support in the RNTuple specification. It has subdirectories for tests concerning fundamental types and C++ types, for example std::vector. More tests are planned in the future, please consult the list of issues in the GitHub repository.

Reference Implementation

This repository also contains a reference implementation with ROOT macros. They currently target ROOT v6.34 with the first official version of the on-disk binary format. In this release, the API is not yet finalized and all classes are in the ROOT::Experimental namespace. We plan to rely on this version until a first version of the RNTuple Validation Suite is done. Then we will produce a first set of reference files that can be used to test backwards compatibility. Afterwards, the implementation will be updated for the stable API (expected in ROOT v6.36).

How to Run

For each test, we implement a write.C and read.C macro in the corresponding subdirectory. The write.C macro produces a .root file with the contents as described in the README of each test subdirectory. The read.C macro produces a .json file with a human-readable representation of the data in the .root file. They can be run individually or all at once with make using the top-level Makefile. The latter is also exercised by a GitHub Actions Workflow: The job also uploads the produced set of .root and .json files, which can be downloaded from the Summary page.