ECE-3574: Applied Software Design Homework 1

Description

Learning Objectives
The primary learning objectives of this homework include learning how to write code using a
library such as Qt and reinforcing the concepts of containers and the iterator pattern. Additional
objectives include getting exposure to the Qt development environment and to console-based Qt
application development.
Exercise
Write a birthday reminder application called birthdays. The classes you must use are QDate, QFile,
QString, QStringList, QTextStream, and std::exception. You may find some other Qt classes useful
too.
● Store name/birthday pairs in any format you like, in a file called birthdays.dat.
● ./birthdays without any command line arguments lists all birthdays coming up in the next 30
days.
● ./birthdays -a yyyy-MM-dd “John Smith” adds or updates the birthday for “John Smith”.
● ./birthdays -n 40 shows birthdays coming up in the next 40 days.
● ./birthdays shows all birthdays that contain the substring
● ./birthdays -d “John Smith” should delete this entry from the file.
● ./birthdays -d yyyy-MM-dd should delete all entries with this birthday from the file.
● ./birthdays -m “John Smith” 40 shows birthdays coming up in the next 40 days from John
Smith’s birthday. This includes John Smith’s birthday.
● ./birthdays -u updates records as needed such that all birthday reminders correspond to the
person’s next birthday (i.e. changes dates in the past and dates more than 1 year in the future
to dates within the following year – exception birthdays on February 29th, which are allowed
to be up to four years in the future). If today is 2016 August 21st a birthday for today stays
the same where a birthday on 2017 August 21st becomes today.
● EXTRA CREDIT: make the previous command, ./birthdays -u also list what records it
updates. This time, a third column should be displayed, showing the time left until the
birthday, in this format: 8 months, 3 weeks, 2 days. If any of these numbers is zero, do not
display it (eg. 8 months, 2 days). When displaying this duration you may assume that the
unit “months” is 30 days and “weeks” is 7 days.
Notes
● All output should be in a format similar to a table (in two columns) like this: Name Birthday
==== ========
John Smith 2016-11-04
Jenny Doe 2016-12-29
● For any illegal input, you have to throw exceptions and have a top-level exception handler
deal with them. The handler should print error messages to stderr on a new line with the text
stated below. The following situations must be taken into consideration:
1. The person name should consist of only printable characters from the standard ASCII
character set (including spaces but excluding tabs and newlines). When invalid, print
“Invalid name”.
2. Check for invalid dates and months; for example, 2010-11-31 or 2010-14-23. Adding
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ECE-3574: Applied Software Design, Spring 2016
Homework 1
past dates is also invalid. Print “Invalid date” for these cases.
3. The could be a full name, partial name or even a letter; character
restrictions are the same as (1). The search must be case sensitive.
4. For ./birthdays –m “John Smith” 40, if the exact name is not found, an exception should
be raised. Print “Name not found”.
● A birthday, B, is “coming up in the next X days” from date Y if Y ≤ B ≤ Y+X.
So ./birthdays –n 0 displays all and only birthdays today.
● If there are no birthdays in the specified time frame or matching the given ,
the program should print “No birthdays found” to stdout (not stderr as in previous cases).
This is not considered an error, so an exception should not be raised.
● When birthdays are selected by date (in the without arguments, -n and -m cases and
additionally the -u case if going for extra credit) they should be printed in chronological
order. When they are selected by , they should be printed in alphabetic
order.
● There are never duplicate names. If the -a option is used twice for the same name the
program should update the corresponding birthday instead of adding a new entry.
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ECE-3574: Applied Software Design, Spring 2016
Homework 1
Grading Grid
● Points awarded for each feature are further divided as follows:
1. The code compiles and runs according to specs – 50%
2. Correctness of the code – 50%
● Extra credit points will only be awarded for code that runs according to specs.
Feature Points
QT style programming and indentation 10
./birthdays without arguments 10
./birthdays -a 10
./birthdays -n 8
./birthdays 8
./birthdays -d 8
./birthdays -d 8
./birthdays -m 8
./birthdays –u 8
Correct output format 6
Correct output order 6
Errors treated correctly 10
Extra credit (no partial credit) 10
Total 110