COP 2224 C++ Programming
Design Project #2

Purpose:

Description:

Courses each have a description, a name (prefix and number, e.g., "COP 2224"), a number of credits, and a list of prerequisite courses.  Students each have a name, a student ID number, a phone number, and a list of courses they've previously taken.  The instructors each have a name, an office location, a phone number, and a list of the classes (not courses) they're teaching currently.  Beside the more obvious constraints on instructors (such as no instructor can teach two classes at the same time), each instructor has a maximum load of classes she can teach in any one semester. 

Before registration begins, the administration decides which courses to offer for the upcoming term and produces a schedule of classes.  Each class (sometime referred to as a section) contains a unique reference number, the corresponding course name, location (campus code, building code, and room number), instructor (there must be some way to say "tba" for to be announced when you don't know who is going to teach a class), an integer code which tells when the course meets, and the maximum and current enrollment.  (Note that the maximum enrollment for most classes depends only on which room the course is in, but as there are many exceptions so we will ignore this and just have an assigned maximum.)

There must be some way for administrators to add and remove classes from the schedule of classes.  When adding a class (really a section of a course), the administrator must specify when and where the class meets, and which instructor will teach it.

For each student, we need the ability to add a student or drop a student from any class.  The system must not allow students to register for classes that they don't have the prerequisites for (unlike the current HCC system!), or if the student is already enrolled in that (or a different) section of the same course, or if the class is full, or if the student is enrolled in another class that meets at the same time.  Students can take a class for credit, or they can audit the course.

Finally, we need to be able to print out some reports.  For each student we should be able to print out a transcript of courses taken in the past, and a current class schedule (assuming the student is currently enrolled in at least one class).

For each instructor we need to be able to print a weekly schedule.

For each class we should be able to print a class roll.

It should be possible to print out the current schedule of classes too.

Design Requirements:

• In this project, we want to design a school registration system as described above, for a school with up to 50,000 students, 300 faculty, and hundreds of classes offered each term.

• Your design should follow the guidelines in your text.  Your design deliverables include the UML diagrams with descriptions as needed.

• Even though you use a menu based user interface, think about using an HTML form based interface instead, or a GUI interface.  Make sure your design is flexible enough to support a change of user interface later.

• You will clearly have a number of different (possibly related) classes, and many objects of those classes.  When saving the information to files (or reading information from files), you are free to design any file formats you wish.  I suggest a different file for each type of information, and a simple format such as one record per line, with a tab between fields.  You might think that in real life this program would interface with an Oracle or some equivalent database management system, but the current HCC system doesn't, and many real life systems don't.  The point is to design your file formats.  (However it is enough to say that there is an indexed-sequential access file for students, instructors, courses, and classes.  You haven't been taught enough to design good file formats so don't spend too much time on this part.)

• You should test your design by having at least one instructor, two classes, one course, and two students in your use cases (i.e., design scenarios).  You should have use cases for the following tasks: add the students to the classes, assign rooms and instructors to classes, and print out schedules for the students and instructor(s), and the schedule of classes.

To be turned in:

Additional Notes:

In many parts of this project, you will need to deal with lists of objects.  The standard C++ library now comes with many different types of list containers you can use: vectors, maps, lists, etc.  You can create and use your own link lists or arrays, but you should think about using the standard ones first.

Saving (and later restoring) objects to disk is called serialization.  Being able to do this well, across different operating systems, different platforms, and possibly different languages, is a very hard problem!  There is a standard for this process, which is called CORBA.  This middleware software allows you to create objects that can be serialized and later used in different applications.  (But it is much, much easier to just save your data to "flat" files or to a database!)  A good reference for design and implementation of file formats is File Structures: An Object-Oriented Approach with C++ by Michael J. Folk, Bill Zoellick, and Greg Riccardi.  ©1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.  ISBN: 0-201-87401-6.