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4.1 Search and Scan Facility

The Level-of-detail support provided in SLOG-2 and Jumpshot-4 tends to help locate states which are either longer in time or occur very frequently. States that are short and occur rarely in a big logfile are very difficult to locate without any special tool. In Jumpshot-4, a search and scan facility is provided to facilitate this goal. There are 3 search criteria: search time, searchable timeline IDs and searchable categories.

  1. Search Time is the time that search starts. It is marked by a yellow line called search cursor. There are 2 different ways of setting the search cursor. When the timeline canvas is in Hand mode as described in Figure 3.11 of section 3.4.1, left mouse clicking will set the search cursor. The other way can be done in either Hand or Zoom mode. First popup an information dialog box of any kind using right mouse clicking, then press the SearchInitialize button in the toolbar to replace the green line by the yellow search cursor. When there are more than one information dialog box, the information dialog box that is shown up last will have its green line used to initialize the search cursor. When Timeline window first starts up, the search cursor is set at the starttime of the logfile.
  2. Searchable Timeline IDs are the timelines that search will operate on, i.e only states on the marked timelines will be returned by the search facility. These marked timelines can be selected by clicking on their timeline IDs on Y-axis label panel with rules described in Table 3.10. When nothing is selected, all timelines are searchable.
  3. Searchable Categories are categories that have their searchable checkboxes enabled as in Figure 3.8. Only drawable with searchable category can be returned by the search facility. By default, all categories in Legend window are searchable.
Figure 4.1: Search of state eos in preview stage. The returned state is a preview state containing state eos as shown in the Search Box and Drawable Info Box.
Image timeline_search_preview

After setting any needed search criteria, the search operation can be carried out by pressing either the SearchForeward or SearchBackward buttons shown in Table 3.12. As shown in Figure 4.1, the search facility returns a searched state which is marked by a transparent 4.1box with a 3D raised border and whose starttime is marked by a yellow search cursor, an upper and a lower 3D arrowheads. The upper 3D arrow's color matches that of the returned state. In the figure, since the returned state is a preview state, so the upper 3D arrow is gray in color as it is shown in Legend window. Accompanied with the 3D raised bordered box is a popup Search Box that shows the detailed of the preview state like the Drawable Info Box in Figure 3.16. Since the search in the figure is looking for state eos, a Drawable Info Box is shown to indicate the returned 3D bordered box does contain category eos graphically. In order to locate the real state eos, a dragged zoom is performed around the 3D raised bordered box and the result is shown in Figure 4.2. In the figure, the real eos is located in the middle of the original 3D bordered box and it is pointed by the Drawable Info Box.

Figure 4.2: Dragged zoom the region around the 3D raised bordered box in Figure 4.1 shows the real state eos.
Image timeline_search_preview_zoomed

In general, when searching on big slog2 file, all preview categories should be set searchable, otherwise searching for real drawables may not return anything. Because at lower zoom level, there may not be any real drawables of the categories of interest, only preview drawable contains the categories of interest. Also, the search facility is carried out for the drawables that are in the physical memory. In some rare occasions, drawables in the memory may have been exhausted for searching before the end of the logfile has been reached, user may need to advance the search by scroll forward or backward to read in more drawables and to restart the search again. For a very big logfile, the search process of a real state may require repeated operations of search and dragged zoom before the real state can be found. This process will be automated in the later version of Jumpshot-4.



Footnotes

...4.1
the transparency of the 3D raised box can be made opaque by selecting the SEARCHED_OBJECT_ON_TOP true.

next up previous contents
Next: 4.2 Tuning of the Up: 4. Special Features Previous: 4. Special Features   Contents