In array-based programming, friends are implicit: you can JOIN any two columns after the fact—you don't have to declare them as friends ahead of time.
In the simplest case, if your arrays a and b have the same length and the same order, you can just use them together, like a + b. It doesn't matter whether a and b came from the same file or not. Even if I've if these is jagged (like jets.phi) and the other is not (like met.phi), you're still fine because the non-jagged array will be broadcasted to match the jagged one.
Note that awkward.Table and awkward.JaggedArray.zip can combine arrays into a single Table or jagged Table for bookkeeping.
If the two arrays are not in the same order, possibly because each writer was individually parallelized, then you'll need some column to act as the key associating rows of one array with different rows of the other. This is a classic database-style JOIN and although Uproot and Awkward don't provide routines for it, Pandas does. (Look up "merging, joining, and concatenating" in the Pandas documenting—there's a lot!) You can maintain an array's jaggedness in Pandas by preparing the column with the awkward.topandas function.
The following issue talks about a lot of these things, though the users in the issue below had to join sets of files, rather than just a single tree. (In principle, a process would have to look ahead to all the files to see which contain which keys: a distributed database problem.) Even if that's not your case, you might find more hints there to see how to get started.
https://github.com/scikit-hep/uproot/issues/314
This is how I have "friended" (befriended?) two TTree's in different files with uproot/awkward.
import awkward
import uproot
iterate1 = uproot.iterate(["file_with_a.root"]) # has branch "a"
iterate2 = uproot.iterate(["file_with_b.root"]) # has branch "b"
for array1, array2 in zip(iterate1, iterate2):
# join arrays
for field in array2.fields:
array1 = awkward.with_field(array1, getattr(array2, field), where=field)
# array1 now has branch "a" and "b"
print(array1.a)
print(array1.b)
Alternatively, if it is acceptable to "name" the trees,
import awkward
import uproot
iterate1 = uproot.iterate(["file_with_a.root"]) # has branch "a"
iterate2 = uproot.iterate(["file_with_b.root"]) # has branch "b"
for array1, array2 in zip(iterate1, iterate2):
# join arrays
zippedArray = awkward.zip({"tree1": array1, "tree2": array2})
# zippedArray. now has branch "tree1.a" and "tree2.b"
print(zippedArray.tree1.a)
print(zippedArray.tree2.b)
Of course you can use array1 and array2 together without merging them like this. But if you have already written code that expects only 1 Array this can be useful.