Programming Project 3--Writing a Program to Keep a Personal Inventory
This project is due on the following days depending on your section of
the course: Wednesday, May 7th for Townsend's and Howard's section.
Thursday, May 8th for Berque's section. Your instructor will announce the
exact time when your project will be due.
Copy the folder proj3 from public into your directory and
complete the project there. The files in ``proj3'' are set up to
support the use of the STL string class, so it is important that you use
this folder as a basis for your project. In addition, these files will
provide you with an empty .cpp file to write your program in, and
an empty .h file to write your class in.
For this project, you will be writing a program for your personal use.
This program will keep track of inventory of a personal collection of
yours. You will be writing a class to represent a single object of your
collection, and completing a program that will allow you to keep track
of inventory of your entire collection.
There are two parts to this project. Depending on your sections, some
parts may be due before the entire project is due--if this is the case,
specifics will be announced in your class.
Part one involves implementing a class for whatever object you choose to
represent for your inventory program. You must adhere to the following:
- There must be at least three data elements in the class
specification. For example, a book class might contain a title (string),
a publication year (int), a publisher (string), and a price (float) for
its data elements. Other examples might include CDs (band, title, number
of tracks, year of publication), coins, stamps, DVDs, etc.
- The object must contain at least the following member functions: a
constructor, an init function (to set the values for the object), a
readFile function (to read a single object from a file), a writeFile
function (to write a single object to a file), and a display function
(to display an object on the screen). You can add other member functions
if you wish.
We strongly suggest you write a simple program to test your class before
moving on to part two. Debugging will be much easier if you are sure
your class is correct before moving on to part two.
Part two involves writing a program to store and organize a collection
of the objects of the class designed above. This program should define
an array of objects of the class you designed in part one above. You may
assume that the program will store no more than 30 objects--although
you should plan ahead for changing this at some future date. The program
should then present the user with a menu similar to the following:
- Load a collection from a file whose name is specified by the user
- Display all the objects in the collection to the screen.
- Save a collection to a file whose name is specified by the user.
- Add an item to the collection.
- Sort the items, based on a single characteristic (title, number, etc.).
- Quit the program.
Then, based upon what option the user chooses, you should perform the
required task. After performing the specified task, the program should
clear the screen and display the menu again. This should continue until
the user chooses to quit the program--note this will require a loop in
your .cpp file.
- When option 1 is selected the program will prompt the user to
enter a filename to read from. After the user enters this filename, the
program opens the file and loads the contents into an array, keeping
track of the number of objects that were stored in the array. The
objects are not to be displayed on the screen at this point.
- When option 2 is selected, the contents of those array cells that
contain data are displayed on the screen.
- When option 4 is selected, the new item is added to the array.
Only if the user selects option 3 later will this new item be saved in a
file.
All six options must be available to the user for your program to
receive full credit. When the program is run initially, the collection
should be empty. The file format, in particular, is up to you. Below, we
provide you with a function that will allow you to store strings with
spaces in them on a single line of a file.
The program should exhibit good style, using functions to separate the
problem into small, manageable units (this includes the main body of the
program, which should be at most a screenful or so long). It should be
well commented (including pre and post conditions for each subprogram)
and easy to read.
Do your writing in stages--make sure one function works before writing
the next. In particular, you should write a small test program to test
the class before actually writing the final program.
To truly make this inventory program useful, you should be able to read
and write strings containing spaces--for example, many book titles
contain spaces, as do CD titles, book titles, etc. Up until this point
in class, we have only been able to read strings from a file or from the
user that do not contain strings.
There is a function in "cs1utils.h" called getline that allows us
to read an entire line of text into a single string variable. Here are
some examples of how getline works:
string x;
cout << "Enter a string with as many spaces as you want: ";
getline( cin, x );
This particular example will allow the user to type until he or she hits
<Return>, then the entire string will be put into x. We can also
use getline to read strings from a file. Assuming that inFile is an
fstream variable that has already been opened to a specific file, we can
type:
cout << "Getting a line from the file..." << endl;
getline( inFile, x );
The getline function should be useful for this project--for example, it
allows you to store multiple word titles on a single line in your file.
Remember, you must #include "cs1utils.h" to use it.