The Objective

The objective of this assignment is to give you practice with project and function design. It will also give you an opportunity to work with reading information from a file, using structures, an array of structures, passing by reference, and some formatted printing.

The Background

The dollar isn't fairing well against other world currencies, so a trip to London and Paris this summer wouldn't be financially responsible. Six-week, cross-country road trips of the past are also out of the question due to high gas prices. Since Ocean City is not my idea of fun, I decided to try to plan a two-week, short road trip to see if it will fit our budget.

I've decided to visit some of the New England states, south-eastern Canada and Niagara Falls by taking a circular route. I have been using Google to find information about the places I'd like to visit and to find out how many miles I'll have to drive between each of these places and the expected driving time between each site.

I have been finding prices of hotels and B & B's I'd like to use, tour prices and musuem admissions. I can even estimate food costs and balance fine meals with cheap eats. The only part of the trip I can't estimate in advance is the amount I'll have to spend on gas. We have no way of knowing what the price of gas will be in June.

I've been putting the information that I've collected into a data file called vacationPlaces.dat, but it's not in the form that I'd like to see AND we need to estimate the cost of the gas in order to find a vacation total.

The Task

Design and code a project that will allow you to read in the information from a data file, store it in an array of structures so that the file can be closed, and then use the information in the array of structures to find the following totals for the entire trip:

• total miles
• total number of nights
• total cost of food & lodging
• total cost of admissions & miscellaneous expenses

• the name of the data file to be used (a string of size 30 or less)
• the mileage the car being driven gets, in miles per gallon (a float)
• the expected gas price (needed to calculate the total cost of gas)

• the total cost of gas
• the grand total for the vacation

The data file contains the following information:

• The first entry in the file is an integer which is the number of legs of the trip.
• The next two entries in the file are the starting location's city and state:
  Baltimore
  MD
  
• After that, the file contains the following fields for each leg:
  • destination city
  • destination state
  • miles between the previous location and this one, the mileage of this leg
  • driving time, which is the estimated driving time in minutes
  • the major attraction of that leg
  • the number of nights spent at the destination location
  • the cost of food & lodging at the destination location
  • the cost of admissions to attractions and any miscellaneous costs

You can view the vacationPlaces.dat file to examine its contents and see its format.

You should copy this file into your account by using the following command:
cp /afs/umbc.edu/users/b/o/bogar/pub/vacationPlaces.dat .

The Specifications

• You must use the following structure definition and typedef:
  typedef struct leg { char originCity[CITY_NAME_SIZE]; char originState[STATE_NAME_SIZE]; char destinCity[CITY_NAME_SIZE]; char destinState[STATE_NAME_SIZE]; float miles; int hours; int minutes; char attraction[ATTRACTION_NAME_SIZE]; int nights; float foodAndLodging; float admissionAndMisc; }LEG; where CITY_NAME_SIZE has been defined to be 11, STATE_NAME_SIZE has been defined to be 3 and ATTRACTION_NAME_SIZE has been defined to be 30.
• You will store the information that you get from the file into an array of LEGs, where each element of the array will hold the information for one leg of the journey. The array size should be 20.
  HINT : the origin of a leg is the previous leg's destination.
• You must ask the user to enter the name of the data file to be used and you must allow that filename to be as much as 30 characters long. Any datafile we use for testing will have the exactly the same format as vacationPlaces.dat
• The file has the driving time in elapsed minutes. You may use the ConvertTimeToHM() function from Lecture #12 without citing your source, to convert this time to the hours and minutes that are to be stored in the LEG.
• You must have a function called FindTotals() and it must have the following prototype:
  void FindTotals (LEG legs[], int numLegs, float* pMiles, int* pHours, int* pMinutes, int* pNights, float* pFoodAndLodging, float* pAdmissionAndMisc); where pMiles, pHours, pMinutes, pNights, pFoodAndLodging and pAdmissionAndMisc are pointers to the variables called miles, hours, minutes, nights, foodAndLodging and admissionAndMisc, respectively, in the calling function, so you should pass the addresses of these variables into this function. This function should total the miles, hours, minutes, nights, food and lodging costs, and admission and miscellaneous costs for all of the legs of the journey and store those totals in the variables miles, hours, etc. in the calling function.
• Be aware that after you've calculated the total time for the trip (the total number of minutes and hours), the value of minutes will probably be way more than 60, which is an hour. So you'll need to adjust the values of hours and minutes of that total, which will result in the value of minutes being less than 60. You could make use of the TimeToHM() function again if you'd like.
• If you would like to have a module called OpenFile(), then it should return a FILE* to the calling function. You are NOT required to have a function called OpenFile(). You may open the file in main() and then pass the FILE* to the function that reads from the file if you prefer. Don't forget to close the file as soon as you have finished reading from it. (To be covered in Lecture on Wed/Thur)
• Do NOT use dynamic memory allocation for the array of LEGs, just declare it (in main). If there are more legs in the file than can be stored in the array, which is is of size 20, then you should print an error message to the user and exit the program. (To be covered in Lecture on Wed/Thur)
• You must produce tables using formatted printing to make them look similar to those shown below in the sample output. You must have the same aligned columns of information as shown. Miles and costs must be aligned by their decimal points as shown. Your spacing of the columns may be different, but your table must fit in an 80-character wide screen.

Sample Runs

Submitting the Program

You are to use separate compilation for this project, so you will be submitting five files.
Your C source code file that contains main() MUST be called proj3.c. You should also have files called trip.c and trip.h, and util.c and util.h.

To submit your project, type the following at the Unix prompt. Note that the project name starts with uppercase 'P'.

submit cs201 Proj3 proj3.c trip.c trip.h util.c util.h

To verify that your project was submitted, you can execute the following command at the Unix prompt. It will show all files that you submitted in a format similar to the Unix 'ls' command.

submitls cs201 Proj3

Monday, 07-Apr-2008 19:19:14 EDT