6.5  Further examples and worked tutorials

The example instrument library ships several dedicated Union categories: Union_demos (including Manual_example, essentially the worked example above), Union_sample_environments, Union_validation (comparisons against the traditional McStas components each process is based on) and Tests_union (unit-style tests of individual features). See the User Manual’s chapter on instrument examples for how to browse these. A number of the individual component headers, documented in the Component Manual’s Union chapter, contain further short usage examples.

For a more gradual, tutorial-style introduction covering geometry, masks, loggers, conditionals, exit volumes and tagging one step at a time, the McStasScript documentation’s Union tutorial series is a useful complement to this chapter [Mcsc]. It is written using McStasScript’s Python interface rather than the plain McStas instrument-file syntax used throughout this manual, but the underlying Union concepts – and the components themselves – are identical, so the explanations translate directly.