The level-of-detail support provided in SLOG-2 and Jumpshot-4's timeline window tends to help locate states that either are longer in time or occur very frequently. States that are short and occur rarely in a big logfile are difficult to locate without a special tool. User can easily spot the rarest states from looking at column count in the Legend window as in Figure 3.6. In Jumpshot-4, a search and scan facility is provided to facilitate this goal. There are three search criteria: search time, searchable timeline IDs, and searchable categories.
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After any needed search criteria have been set, the search operation can be carried out by pressing either the SearchForeward or SearchBackward buttons shown in Table 3.14. As shown in Figure 4.1, the search facility returns a searched state that is marked by a transparent 4.1box with a 3D raised border and whose starttime is marked by a yellow search cursor and an upper and a lower 3D arrowhead. The upper 3D arrow's color matches that of the returned state. In the figure, the returned state is a preview state, so the upper 3D arrow is gray, as shown in the Legend window. Accompanied with the 3D raised bordered box is a popup Search Box that shows the details of the preview state, like the Drawable Info Box in Figure 3.17. Since the search in the figure is looking for state eos, a Drawable Info Box is shown to indicate that 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; 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 to by the Drawable Info Box.
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In general, when one is searching in a big slog2 file, all preview categories should be set searchable; otherwise, searching for real drawables may not return anything because at the lower zoom level there may be no real drawables of the categories of interest. Only the preview drawable contains the categories of interest. Also, the search facility is carried out for the drawables that are in the physical memory. On rare occasions, drawables in the memory may have been exhausted for searching before the end of the logfile has been reached; thus, the user may need to advance the search by scrolling forward or backward to read in more drawables and to restart the search. 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 a later version of Jumpshot-4.