Engineering Change Notices

• ECN 1 further specifies input guarantees for project 3. It includes guarantees about the contents of the data file and also about user input.

The Objective

The objective of this assignment is to give you practice with arrays of structs, working with characters as input, file-handling, dynamic memory allocation, working with strings, passing by reference, command-line arguments, and, of course, design and separate compilation.

The Background

You have been hired by the CSEE department as the CMSC 201 gradeskeeper. One of your responsibilities is to generate reports. There are basically two different kinds of reports. One type, called stats, gives the breakdown of the number of students by major, by sex, by class (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) and by section. (I will give an example stats report.)

The other type of report is a grade report. Grade reports can be created for an individual student, all the students of a specific section, or all students in the class. You are to to write a program that prints out these reports (TO AN OUTPUT FILE ONLY - NOT TO A PRINTER ), using the data found in the file called p3students.dat.

The Task

At this point the user should be presented with a greeting and then a main menu that allows him/her to choose the type of report to generate or to quit.

• where choosing 'S' will immediately start generating the statistical report, which should be written to a file called stats.txt.
• choosing 'G' will present the user with another menu, where s/he may select
  • ' I ' to create a grade report for an individual student
  • 'S' to select a section and genetate reports for all students enrolled in that section
  • 'A' to generate a grade report with averages by section and for the class as a whole or
  • 'R' to return to the main menu.
  and choosing 'Q' allows the user to quit.

The records of the students are kept in ascending sorted order by login name and has the information stored separated by spaces for each record in the following order:

login(max of 8 chars) lastName(max of 15 chars) firstName(max of 15 chars) sex(char) major(max of 4 chars) section(max of 5 chars) class(max of 2 chars) proj1(int) proj2(int) proj3(int) proj4(int) proj5(int) lab1(int) lab2(int) lab3(int) lab4(int) lab5(int) lab6(int) lab7(int) lab8(int) lab9(int) lab10(int) lab11(int) lab12(int) midterm(int) finalExam(int)

The file begins with a single integer which is the number of student records in the file. Here's an example of an input file's format:

Design Limitations and Details

• You are required to use separate compilation for this project. The file that contains main() is to be called proj3.c. You must also have a students.c and the associated students.h file. You might want to use your util.c and associated util.h if you have any general functions that you want to add to them, or reuse some functions that you may already have there. The number of files you use is up to you, but functions need to be grouped appropriately and placed in files whose names reflect the purpose of the functions grouped there. If you are using your util.c file for this project you do NOT remove function definitions from it that aren't being used in the current project. Just leave them in.
• You MUST use dynamic memory allocation (malloc or calloc) to allocate the memory to hold the array of structures after you have read the number of records from the file.
• You must read the entire contents of the input file, load the data into an array of structs and close the file before presenting the initial menu to the user.
• Menus must accept either uppercase or lowercase versions of the letters specified. So S, s, G, g, Q, & q are acceptable for the main menu and I, i, S, s, A, a, R, & r are acceptable for the grades menu.
• All reports should print to files. DO NOT send reports to a printer.
  • The statistics report should be written to a file called stats.txt.
  • There are several kinds of grade reports.
    • A grade report for an individual student, whose login name is dblock, should be written to a file called dblock.txt. It should include a report of all her grades and her total course score and letter grade. The course score can be determined by the following:
      • Each lab score is out of 3 points and each of the 10 best labs counts as 1% of the total score. (lowest 2 labs are dropped)
      • Each project is worth 8% of the grade and is based on a score of 100.
      • Each exam grade is worth 25% of the grade and is based on a score of 100.
      • The letter grade is assigned without a curve, so an A is assigned to a course score of 89.5 and above, a B for scores between 79.5 and 89.4, etc.
    • A grade report for an entire section, should consist of individual grade reports for each student in that section separated by a long line of dashes, as in:
      ------------------------------------------------------ and a section report that gives the section averages for each lab, project, and exam as well as the average total score for the students in that section. These reports should be written to a file that is named by the section number, i.e. 0101.txt.
    • A grade report for the entire class should be composed of section reports separated by lines of dashes and the class averages for each lab, project and exam, as well as the average of the total scores for the entire class. This report should be written to a file called CMSC201.txt
• The individual grade report filenames, must be composed using string functions.
• You MUST have a function called CalculateStats() that has the following function prototype: void CalculateStats(STUDENT* students, int numStudents, int* pMale, int* pFemale, int* pCmsc, int* pCmpe, int class[], int numClasses, int sections[], int numSections); that uses call by reference to modify the number of males, females, CMSC majors and CMPE majors known in the calling function.
  You may NOT modify this prototype.
• You must close all files as soon as you are finished either reading from them or writing to them.
• On normal (non-error) execution of the program, you must free all memory that you allocated dynamically.
• As always, you will be graded on your design as well as the correctness of your program, documentation and style.

A Short Sample Run

Sample Statistical Report

Copying the file

The executable and the data file need to be in the same directory when you run the program. The command to copy the file is:

cp /afs/umbc.edu/users/s/b/sbogar1/pub/p3students.dat .

Note that there are three parts of the command separated by spaces. The last part is a period (with a space before it), which says copy the file to current directory.

Submitting the Program

To submit the files you should use the command:

submit cs201 Proj3 proj3.c students.c students.h (followed by any other .c and .h files your project needs to be compiled)

Do NOT submit p3students.dat nor any of your output files (stats.txt, or any other *.txt file).

You can check your submission by using the command:

submitls cs201 Proj3

Sunday, 06-Nov-2005 19:29:37 EST