Description

Overview

For this assignment, you are going to load a series of files containing data and search the loaded data for specific criteria. That might sound a bit dry, but the files contain information about LEGO sets, and everyone loves LEGO! The structure of this assignment is a bit open-ended; you can solve this problem in any way that you see fit. That is the first part of the lab, which is worth 20 points. You will submit this portion on zyBooks, just like the previous assignments.

The second part of the lab involves interacting with the terminal, and providing command-line arguments to your application. You are going to use the filename as command-line argument of main(). To achieve this, you will modify the main.cpp file. This portion will be worth 5 points, and you will submit this via Canvas.

Description

First things first, the files: There are 3 main files that you will be loading in this assignment:

• csv
• csv
• csv

In addition, there are 3 sample files included with this document. Use those to test your loading process. The 3 larger files (on zyBooks, without “SAMPLE_” in the filename) are in the exact same format, the sample files have just been reduced to a handful of entries, so you could easily test as you go.

The data that you will be loading is information about a LEGO set:

1. Its set number
2. The theme it comes from (City, Technic, Star Wars, etc.)
3. The name of the set
4. How many parts and mini-figures it contains (if any)
5. Its price in US dollars

Your goal is to read this from 1 of those 3 files (or all of them at once), store it, and then search it based on a few different criteria.

Main.cpp is only required for this assignment, but you are free to write any class/functions that you see fit to assist you solve this problem. Main.cpp has some structure to it already to help you get started. Take some time to think about how you might go about this before diving in.

         

Searches

The different searches you will perform will be based on a menu that might look like this:

1. Most expensive
2. Largest piece count
3. Search for set name containing… 4. Search themes…
4. Part count information 6. Price information
5. Minifigure information
6. If you bought one of everything…

 

Most Expensive   From the sets that were loaded, which is the most expensive?	The most expensive set is:   Name: Super Awesome Building Set Number: 99923 Theme: City Price: $21.99 Minifigures: 4 Piece count: 286
Largest piece count   From the sets that were loaded, which has the most parts?	The set with the highest parts count:   Name: Really Big Set Number: 22231 Theme: Technic Price: $249.99 Minifigures: 0 Piece count: 5211
Search for set names containing…   Get a string as input from the user. Then search all sets and their names to see if they contain the search term.   There could be a lot of sets matching the search term, so show them in a more concise, list format with the set ID, name, and price. If no sets are found, report that as well.	Sets matching “Fire Station”:   49281 Fire Station $19.99 9381 Big Fire Station $49.99   -OR-   No sets found matching that search term
Search for set themes containing…   Ditto[1], but for the theme of the set instead	Sets matching “City”:   1234 Police Station $29.99 49281 Fire Station $19.99 // And TONS more… LEGO City is huge!!
Part count information	Average part count for 601 sets: 492
Show the average parts for all the loaded sets which have non-zero values, and show the largest/smallest sets as well	Set with the smallest part count: [Set data goes here]   Set with the largest part count: [Set data goes here]
Price information   Ditto, but for prices: Average, Minimum & Maximum	Average price information for 601 sets: $500   Set with the minimum price: [Set data goes here]   Set with the maximum price: [Set data goes here]
Mini-figure information   Ditto, but for mini-figures
If you bought one of everything…   How much would it costs? How many parts and mini-figures would you have?	If you bought one of everything…   It would cost: $9999.99 You would have 200207 pieces in your collection You would have an army of 3000 mini-figures!

 

Reading Files

When reading a text file, all of the data typically gets read in as a string. If the final storage variable isn’t a string (such as a person’s age, or the price of something), you must convert it. In the <string> header file, there are a number of functions to help you convert. These function converts a STRING_TO_SOMETHING, and are named like stoi (string to integer), stof (string to float), etc.

The implementation of some of these functions may throw an exception of type “invalid_argument” if the conversion process fails, so you may want to encapsulate these operations in try/catch blocks, and use a default value if you catch an exception—if the number can’t be converted, (in this case) it’s because a value wasn’t there, so what would be a good value to use in the absence of anything else? Refer back to the section on Exceptions in your textbook if you need to.

Terminal

The reasoning behind interacting with the terminal is to increase your flexibility and exposure. It’s a great idea to utilize an IDE for enormous projects. However, there will be times where you will be required to use the terminal as a developer. You will live in the terminal world while enrolled in Operating Systems. The below definition gives a brief synopsis:

 

“The command-line shell is a text-based user interface for your operating system. Unlike a GUI shell, which uses a graphical representation of the system’s services and resources, the command-line shell uses only text. It is the fundamental interface between you and the operating system, and in many cases offer you more direct control over the system processes.”

 

Your goal in this portion of the lab is to pass in the filename when running your program. To achieve this, you can do the following:

1. Open up terminal and navigate to your project directory to compile it using g++
   1. Refer to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) page in Canvas
2. Run your program and pass in the filename as a parameter
   1. E. “./main.out lab5_sample.txt”
   2. You should throw -1 if the file doesn’t exist.

 

From this, you should observe that testing is much faster. Make sure to refer to the Useful Resources section as it contains helpful articles.