Question

You will be developing an Advising Scheduling Management System (ASMS) that can be used managing the advising appointments for Salisbury University professors and their advisees (students). ASMS should have the following functionalities:

- There are three kinds of users: professor, student and admin. When ASMS starts, a login screen asks user which kinds of users and then asks user id and password. If id or password are incorrect, issue a warning and redisplay the login screen.

- When an admin logins on to the system, he/she can add/remove a new professor and/or a new student information to/from the system. Professor’s information entered should contain: password, first name, last name, employee id, his/her timetable should be set to empty, a list of their advisees should be empty and incoming requests should be empty as well; Student information should include: password, first name, last name, student id. Admin must assign an adviser to the new student. The appointment time and outstanding request should be empty;

- When a professor logins on to the system, he/she can 1) edit his/her schedule (Monday to Friday from 8-5) by adding a task, editing an existing task or removing an existing task to certain day/time; The tasks on the schedule can be “teaching/appointment/available”. The unit time for each task is 1 hour; 2) view his/her weekly or daily schedule (show day/time/task); 3) view a list of his/her advisee appointment for certain day (show student names and appointment time ordered by time); 4) see a list of his/her advisee (show name and id); 5) view incoming advisee requests (show the names of students who send the requests ordered by the order the requests are received) and approve them one by one.

- A student can 1) see the weekly schedule of their advisor; 2) sign up for an appointment (by selecting day and time); 3) remove an appointment (by providing day and time); 4) request to switch his/her advisor by looking at a list of available professors and select one from the list and submit the request.

- Users should have the option to exit the system.

1. Professor information should include: login id, password, first name, last name, employee id, his/her timetable and a list of their advisees’ student id and incoming requests;

2. Student information should include: login id, password, first name, last name, student id, adviser’s employee id, their appointment (day and time) and outstanding request;

3. Information about professors and students is stored in an external file called “ASMS.db”, which is simply a text file. When ASMS starts for the first time, all information in ASMS.db is read into the internal data structures. During the execution of ASMS, any changes of information is to be made to the internal data structures as well. Before you exit ASMS, all the changes saved in the internal data structures should be written into ASMS.db.

4. Here are some assumptions and restrictions:

a. You only need to show the schedule of one week.

b. Student id and employee id should be eight digits only.

c. Login id should be the first letter of the first and last name followed by the last three digits of the id.

d. A student can only send a request to a professor one at a time; but there is no limit for the number of requests to be sent.

e. Changing advisor can only become official after a professor approves it; after that the request should be removed from the professor’s incoming request list and student’s outstanding request.

f. Student can only sign up appointment on the available slot. Otherwise, issue warning.

g. Student can only remove an existing appointment. Otherwise, issue warning. Before final removal, ask user to confirm.

The file looks as follows

2 # total number of professors
Sophie Wang password1 88888888          # professor information: firstname, lastname, password, employee id
1 T T O A O O O A O O 12345678 23456789 # 1 for monday, T for teaching, A for appointment and O for available followed by list of student ids for appointments 
2 T T T O T T O O O O                   # 2 for tuesday
3 O O T T T T A T T T 11111111          # 3 for wednesday
4 T T T T T T T T T O                   # 4 for thursday
5 A T T T T O O O O O 22222222          # 5 for friday
2 8989898989 6565656565                 # number of incoming requests followed by list of requester's student id
Steve Lauterburg password2 88888880
1 T T O A O O O T O O 92345678  
2 T T T O T T O O O O
3 O O T T T T A T T T 91111111
4 T T T T T T T T T O
5 A O O O O O O O O O 92222222
0
9 # total number of students
Owen Dennis password3 12345678 88888888 1 4 N   # student information: firstname, lastname, password, student id, advisor id, appointment day, appoitment time, incoming request (Y for yes and N for no)
Calvin Geisbert password4 23456789 88888888 1 8 N 
Ethan Gray password4 11111111 88888888 3 7 N
Daniel Hersey password5 22222222 88888888 5 1 N
Osmaan Ishfaq password6 92345678 88888880 1 4 N
Noah Kelly password7 91111111 88888880 3 7
Blaine Mason password8 92222222 88888880 5 1
Nicholas Orsini password9 8989898989 88888880 0 0 Y 
Austin Parsons password10 6565656565 88888880 0 0 Y

I just need to know how to get started with using the files to login to the screen

Answer 1

Given that you have to read the data from ASMS.db of both teachers and students, create a structure that can store the data of one professor and another structure data of one student. Now take a vector which can store the structures. We are using vector because we do not know exactly how many professors or students are there in the data file, so for vector we can dynamically add the structures. So the structures should look something like:

struct student{

string firstname, lastname, password, studentid, advisorid;

int apptime, appday;

}

vector<student> student_array;

Now after creating the structures of both students ans professors read the data into the stuctures and push them onto vectors. You have all the data now. Apply the modifications on the data as given by the user and after modifications push the same data of both sudent and professor onto the file.