Applications and workflows

heron ships command-line applications under apps/. The unified heron CLI dispatches to these tools, and each stage writes artefacts that feed the next.

Unified CLI

The heron command exposes the main workflow stages:

  • heron art: scan art ROOT files and record provenance.

  • heron sample: aggregate SampleIO files with normalisation.

  • heron event: build event-level output with derived columns.

  • heron macro: run plotting macros.

  • heron status: print status for available binaries.

  • heron paths: print resolved workspace paths.

  • heron env: output environment exports for a workspace.

Standalone applications

The CLI maps to these executable entry points:

  • heronArtFileIOdriver: provenance scanning and metadata capture.

  • heronSampleIOdriver: sample aggregation and normalisation.

  • heronEventIOdriver: event tree production from SampleIO inputs.

These are useful when integrating into batch workflows or production scripts.

Workflow summary

A typical workflow is:

  1. Scan art files to register provenance.

  2. Build a SampleIO file and update the sample list.

  3. Produce event output with column derivations.

  4. Run macros to produce plots.

Each application writes its outputs under scratch/out/<set> by default, and plotting artefacts are written under scratch/plot/<set> unless overridden by environment variables. The <set> segment defaults to out and is controlled by HERON_SET or heron --set.