Creating a factory

Last updated on 2026-07-10 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 11 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What is the difference between an algorithm and a factory?
  • How is EICrecon’s plugin structure organized, and where do new factories go?
  • Which factory base class should I use, and what does its interface look like?

Objectives

  • Understand the basics of EICrecon’s plugin structure.
  • Understand where to put new factories.
  • Understand which factory base class to use.
  • Understand the JOmniFactory interface.

Algorithms and Factories

We make a crisp distinction between algorithms and factories.

Algorithms are classes that perform one kind of calculation we need and they do so in a generic, framework-independent way. Factories, in comparison, are classes that attach Algorithms to the JANA framework. You should write Algorithms to be independently testable, and you should write a Factory so that JANA can use the Algorithm within EICrecon. The factory layer handles issues like obtaining all of the inputs from other factories, publishing the outputs so that other factories can use them or they can be written to file, obtaining the correct parameters, making sure the Algorithm has been initialized, and making sure that the correct calibrations are loaded when the run number changes.

Here’s an example to help illustrate what goes into the Algorithm and what goes into the Factory. Consider calorimeter clustering. The clustering algorithm should be independent of any individual detector, and have a set of parameters that control its behavior and live in a plain-old-data Config object. You could copy-paste this code into a codebase that uses a completely different reconstruction framework and it would still work, as long as you were using the same datamodel (e.g. edm4hep). Each detector could have its own factory (if it calls the algorithm in a substantially different way) or they may all use the same factory (if the factories only differ in their parameter values). The parameter values themselves could be hardcoded to the factory, but we strongly prefer to set them externally using a factory generator. This gives us a cleaner separation of configuration from code, and will let us do fun things in the future such as wiring factories together from an external config file, or performing parameter studies.

The basics of EICrecon’s plugin structure

JANA plugins are a mechanism for controlling which parts of EICrecon get compiled and linked together. They give us the ability to avoid having to compile and link heavy dependencies that not everybody will be using all the time. For instance, by default EICrecon uses ACTS for tracking, but perhaps someone wants to benchmark ACTS against Genfit – we wouldn’t want to have to ship Genfit inside eic-shell all the time.

Plugins were also designed so that users could integrate their analyses directly into reconstruction while keeping them independent and optional. This pattern is heavily used in the GlueX experiment and recommended in the tutorials on JANA’s own documentation. In EICrecon, we set up separate plugins for each detector and each benchmark, but not for each analysis. We strongly recommend following the advice given in the analysis tutorials instead. See the JANA2 end-user plugin tutorial for instructions on adding a new plugin.

Where to put new factories

The EICrecon plugins are organized as follows. Under src/detectors we have subdirectories for each individual detector, and each of them corresponds to one plugin that adds the detector’s factory generators. Benchmarks are analogous. If an algorithm/factory will only ever be used in that one context, it can live there; otherwise, and preferably, the corresponding algorithm lives under src/algorithms and the corresponding factory lives under src/factories.

Once you figure out which plugin your algorithm naturally belongs to, find its InitPlugin() method. By convention this lives in a .cc file with the same name as the plugin itself. This is where you will add your factory generator.

Which factory base class to use

There are a number of different kinds of factories available in JANA which we have used within EICrecon at different points in time. Luckily, if you are writing an Algorithm from scratch, there is only one you will need to be familiar with: JOmniFactory. However, some of the earlier ones are still around, and just in case you need to modify or reuse those, here is a quick history lesson.

JFactoryT<T> is JANA’s fundamental factory base class. However, we don’t use it in EICrecon because it has the following limitations:

  1. It has difficulty with PODIO data. PODIO data needs very special handling, otherwise it will leak memory or corrupt your object associations. To address this, we developed JFactoryPodioT, which extends JFactoryT to support PODIO correctly.

  2. It can only output one collection. This might seem fine at first, but frequently we need to output “Association” collections alongside the primary output collection. To address this, we developed JMultifactory, which supports multiple outputs, including PODIO data.

  3. If you want to reuse an Algorithm in a different context, you need to duplicate the JFactoryT/JPodioFactoryT/JMultifactory. Until this point, collection and parameter names were hardcoded inside individual factories. To get around this, we developed JChainMultifactoryT so that we could create multiple instances of the same factory and assign them different collection and parameter names in a logical way.

  4. It requires a deeper understanding of JANA internals to use correctly. The user is allowed to perform actions inside the factory callbacks that don’t necessarily make sense. We remedied this issue by developing JOmniFactory, which declares what it needs upfront, and JANA provides it only when it makes sense. JOmniFactory supports all of the functionality developed for points (1), (2), and (3), and presents a simpler interface.

In summary, always use JOmniFactory if you are writing something new. The migration of all EICrecon factories to JOmniFactory (tracked in EICrecon issue #1176) is essentially complete, so you should not encounter the older base classes in current code.

The JOmniFactory interface

The basic idea behind an OmniFactory is to declare what you need upfront. That way, the framework can retrieve everything you need at the right time, and it can handle complex namespacing logic behind the scenes so that you can dynamically rewire and reconfigure factories.

Earlier factory base classes, such as JChainMultifactory, require users to do a lot in their callbacks. Not so with JOmniFactory, which moves most of the functionality into registered members instead, as we shall discuss later. The callbacks are still there, but are made much simple, and focus on satisfying the underlying Algorithm’s needs instead of JANA’s.

These are the callbacks you’ll need to implement:

CPP 

    void Configure();
    void ChangeRun(int32_t run_number);
    void Process(int32_t run_number, uint64_t event_number);

Configure is called once when the factory is instantiated. This is where the user should initialize the underlying Algorithm. JANA will have already fetched the services, configured the logger, and set the values of the Config struct, so all the user needs to do is pass these things to the Algorithm.

ChangeRun is called once JANA detects that a new run has been started. This is where the user should update calibration data or other resources keyed off of the run number. JOmniFactory also provides a Resource registered member to automatically retrieve data from an arbitrary Service, though this is still experimental.

Process is called for every event. (Side note: Although note that because different threads have different factory instances, any individual factory cannot be guaranteed to witness the entire event stream. If you need to have one instance that processes the entire event stream, JANA provides JEventProcessors and JEventProcessorSequential for that purpose.) JANA will have already prefetched the registered Inputs before Process is called. The user needs to execute the Algorithm using those inputs, and copy the resulting outputs back to the registered Outputs. JANA will then take care of publishing the outputs downstream.

Note that unlike earlier factory base classes, JOmniFactory uses the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern so that the callback methods aren’t virtual. This lets the optimizer get rid of any performance penalty for the extra layer of indirection.

Here is the full JOmniFactory code skeleton:

CPP 


#pragma once
#include "extensions/jana/JOmniFactory.h"

class ReconstructedElectrons_factory : public JOmniFactory<ReconstructedElectrons_factory> {
private:

    // Declare inputs and outputs
    // PodioInput<edm4hep::MCParticle> m_in_mc_particles {this, "MCParticles"};
    // PodioOutput<edm4eic::ReconstructedParticle> m_out_reco_particles {this};

    // Declare parameters
    // ParameterRef<double> m_min_energy_over_momentum {this, "minEnergyOverMomentum", config().min_energy_over_momentum};
 
    // Declare services
    // Service<DD4hep_service> m_geoSvc {this};

public:
    void Configure() {
        // This is called when the factory is instantiated.
        // Use this callback to make sure the algorithm is configured.
        // The logger, parameters, and services have all been fetched before this is called
    }

    void ChangeRun(int32_t run_number) {
        // This is called whenever the run number is changed.
        // Use this callback to retrieve state that is keyed off of run number.
    }

    void Process(int32_t run_number, uint64_t event_number) {
        // This is called on every event.
        // Use this callback to call your Algorithm using all inputs and outputs
        // The inputs will have already been fetched for you at this point.
        // m_algo->process({...}, {...});

        logger()->debug( "Event {}: Calling Process()", event_number );
    }
};

The JOmniFactory inputs and outputs

The user specifies the JOmniFactory’s inputs by declaring PodioInput or VariadicPodioInput objects as data members. These are templated on the basic PODIO type (Not the collection type or mutable type or object type or data type), and require the user to pass this as a constructor argument. These objects immediately register themselves with the factory, so that the factory always knows exactly what data it needs to fetch. To access the data once it has been fetched, the user can call the object’s operator(), which returns a constant pointer to a PODIO collection of the correct type. For instance, suppose the user declares the data member:

CPP 

PodioInput<edm4hep::MCParticle> m_particles_in {this};

In this case, the user would access the input data like this:

CPP 

const edm4hep::MCParticleCollection* particles_in = m_particles_in();

Of course, for brevity, the user could simply pass m_particles_in() straight into the algorithm, and write the algorithm output through m_particles_out().get() — which is the pattern most factories use today:

CPP 

m_algo->process({m_particles_in()}, {m_particles_out().get()});

As you have just seen, PodioOutputs are very analogous to PodioInputs.

Challenge

Exercise

  • Create your own ElectronReconstruction factory from the code skeleton above.
  • Give your OmniFactory a single output collection.
  • Have its Process() method produce some log output.
  • Experiment with giving it different input collections.

Copy the skeleton into a new header under src/factories/reco/, keep a single PodioOutput member, and add a logger()->debug(...) call inside Process(). Adding or changing PodioInput members changes which collections JANA fetches for you; the factory will fail to run if you request a collection that no other factory produces.

Key Points
  • Algorithms do framework-independent calculation; factories attach algorithms to JANA2.
  • Plugins control what gets compiled; register factory generators in a plugin’s InitPlugin().
  • Reusable algorithms go in src/algorithms and their factories in src/factories.
  • Always use JOmniFactory for new code; declare inputs, outputs, parameters, and services as registered members.