Final Project: A Database

Your task is to create a database that can search, sort, and add/delete data. All the data in the database consists of records, and each record consists of fields of different types. For example, if your database is storing songs, then its records might have fields for the song name (a string), the artist (a string), and the year of publication (a whole number).

Your record must have at least four fields, and at least one field must be a string, and at least one field must be a number. Please note this is the minimal size of a record, and more fields are encouraged.

You should make your database about something you're interested in. For example, your records could be songs, movies, books, games, celebrities, sports teams, etc.

Working with a Partner

You can do this project on your own, or with a partner.

If you work with a partner, both you and your partner must do an equal amount of work, and you must both understand the whole program (even the parts you didn't program). Markers will expect that projects done by teams have more features/functionality/polish than single-person teams.

Teams of more than 2 are not permitted under any circumstances.

General Implementation Constraints

Please use standard C++ techniques as discussed in the course: show us that you understand what the course teaches. Only use code written by you (and your partner, if you have one). You can use any standard C++ libraries.

Don't use any code or libraries written by others. With one exception: you can use the ncurses library.

Submitting Your Work

On Canvas, please submit a5.zip, containing all the source code so the marker can compile and run your project. As described below, make sure to also include README.txt filled-in with the details of your project.

Basic Requirements

Before we give your program any marks, it must meet the following basic requirements:

• It must compile on Ubuntu Linux. If the marker can't compile your code, your mark for this project will be 0.

• It must have no memory leaks or memory errors, according to valgrind, e.g.:

  $ valgrind ./a5
    
  // ... lots of output ... 
  

  A program is considered to have no memory errors if:

  • In the LEAK SUMMARY, definitely lost, indirectly lost, and possibly lost must all be 0.

  • The ERROR SUMMARY reports 0 errors.

  • It is usually okay if still reachable reports a non-zero number of bytes.

• You must include the large comment section with student info and the statement of originality in the file with main(). If your submitted program does not have this, then we will assume your work is not original and it might not be marked.

If your program meets all these basic requirements, then it will be graded using the marking scheme below.

Marking Scheme

If you're working with a partner, then both partners will get the same marks.

Source Code Readability (6 marks)

• All names of variables, functions, structs, classes, etc. are sensible, self-descriptive, and consistent.

• Indentation and spacing is perfectly consistent and matches the structure of the program. All blank lines and indents have a reason.

• All lines are 100 characters in length, or less.

• Comments are used when appropriate, e.g to describe code that is tricky or very important. There are no unnecessary comments, and no commented-out code.

• Appropriate features of C++ are used in an appropriate way. For example, do not use a feature of C (like C-style strings) when there is a better C++ feature (e.g. the standard string class). Don't use any features you don't understand.

• Overall, the source code is easy to read and understand.

Design Features

(1 mark) A class that stores a single database record. The name of this class is up to you, but it should describe what it stores. For instance, if your database is storing songs, then a good name for this class is Song.

(1 mark) A class called Database that stores all the records. The methods of this class are probably where you want to implement the searching and sorting functions.

(1 mark) A class called Menu that represents a menu of choices that the user can choose from.

(2 marks) The three classes above are separately compiled and their .o files are linked together using a makefile. To build your programs executable, the marker should only have to type make.

Important: Please compile your program with the standard compile flags that have been used throughout the course for all assignments:

CPPFLAGS = -std=c++17 -Wall -Wextra -Werror -Wfatal-errors -Wno-sign-compare -Wnon-virtual-dtor -g

There should be no compiler warnings when your program is compiled.

You can create more classes than the three above, but you must have at least those three classes.

(3 marks) Sensible use of public, private, constructors, destructors, and methods. You can use inheritance if it makes sense, but it's not required.

(1 mark) Fill in README.txt and include it in your submission.

Menus

(1 mark) Menus are used to give the user choices. For example, the main menu might look like this:

Welcome to the Song Database!
-----------------------------

(A)dd a song.
(F)ind a song.
(D)elete a song.
(L)ist songs.
(Q)uit

Enter the letter of your choice: 

Make your menus neat and tidy and easy to use. In this example, the choices are made by choosing letters, but you could use numbers instead. Do what you think is best.

(1 mark) When the user enters an invalid menu choice, the program re-asks the user to pick a choice.

(3 marks) Non-trivial use of the ncurses library to help draw nice-looking menus. Here is a demo of how to call and use the ncurses library. The makefile includes a special command for compiling ncurses_demo.cpp, so you just need to type this:

$ make ncurses_demo
g++ ncurses_demo.cpp -std=c++17 -Wall -Wextra -Werror -Wfatal-errors -Wno-sign-compare -Wnon-virtual-dtor -g -lncurses -o ncurses_demo

The option -lncurses is necessary for ncurses to work.

Beyond this example (and what's mentioned in the online notes), we are not going to tell you how to use ncurses. Instead, we'd like you to do a little bit of web research into how to use it. If you search the web for, say, "ncurses tutorial", you can find helpful examples. Researching how to use libraries is an ordinary part of programming.

Hint: You don't have to start using ncurses. You could begin using simple menus printed with cout, and then add support for ncurses later once most of your program works.

Adding a Record

(1 mark) When the user chooses to enter a record, then your program asks them to enter each piece of data in the record. After the user enters valid data, then your program should say the record has been added, and go back to the main menu.

(1 mark) If the record already exists in the database, then you should tell the user the record already exists and not add a new record.

(1 mark) Don't let the user enter invalid data. For instance, when entering the year a song was published, if the user enters out-of-range numbers, like -343 or 29201, then your program should re-ask the user for a valid number.

(1 mark) If the user enters the wrong type of data, then your program should re-ask the user for correct data. For instance, when entering the year a song was published, if the user enters a string like "this year", then your program should re-ask the user for a valid number.

Finding a Record

(1 mark) When the user chooses this option they are shown a sub-menu that lists the different ways they can search for a record. The user should be allowed to search for any kind of data in the record. For example, in a song database where song records consist of a name, artist, and year, the sub-menu might look like this:

Find a Song
-----------

You can search by:

(N)ame of song
(A)rtist who performed the song
(Y)ear of song

(R)eturn to main menu

Enter the letter of your choice: 

(1 mark) For including an option to return to the main menu.

(1 mark) When searching for strings, one kind of search should print all records where the typed-in string from the user exactly matches the appropriate field of a record.

(1 mark) When searching for strings, one kind of search should print all records where the typed-in string from the user occurs as a substring in the appropriate field of a record.

(1 mark) When searching for numbers, one kind of search should print all records where the typed-in number from the user exactly matches the appropriate field of a record.

(1 mark) When searching for numbers, one kind of search should print all records where the number the appropriate field of a record is in a range, from low to high. This would, for example, let the user see all songs in a song database from the year 2005 to 2015.

In all cases of finding records, if no matching records are found, then print a helpful message to the screen telling the user this.

Deleting a Record

(1 mark) When deleting a record, one way to do this is to search by the exact string that occurs in a field of the record.

(1 mark) When deleting a record, one way to do this is to search by for a substring that occurs in a field of the record.

(1 mark) When deleting a record, one way to do this is to search by the exact number that occurs in a field of the record.

(1 mark) When deleting a record, one way to do this is to search for numbers in a field that appear in a low to high range of numbers.

In all cases of deleting records:

• display the searched-for records to the user, and then ask them if they are sure they want to delete them

• if no matching records are found, then print a helpful message to the screen telling the user this

Listing Records

(1 mark) For each string field in your record, allow the user to list all records in alphabetical order.

(1 mark) For each string field in your record, allow the user to list all records in reverse alphabetical order.

(1 mark) For each numeric field in your record, allow the user to list all records in ascending order.

(1 mark) For each numeric field in your record, allow the user to list all records in descending order.

Starting and Quitting the Database

(1 mark) When your program starts it reads the records from a text file database.txt into memory.

(1 mark) In the main menu, there is an option for the user to quit the database. When the user chooses it the program ends.

(1 mark) When the user quits the database, all the records are saved to a text file named database.txt. The exact format of the file is up to you, but you might want to use comma-separated values, e.g.:

What About Me?, Snarky Puppy, 2014
Let the Mystery Be, Iris DeMent, 1992

Be careful: an issue with comma-separated values is that you need to do something to handle commas that appear in strings. Those commas should not be treated as separators.

Please put at least 20 records (ideally more!) in database.txt when you submit it. That way the marker will have something to try when they test your program.