CIS 636 Fall 2002 Assignment 3 – Object Oriented Programming in Java – Creating a Class 100 points

Assigned: 02/10/2003

Due: 02/17/2003 at the start of class

You may work individually or in pairs for this assignment. But all work must be the work of the person/people whose name is on the code! If working in pairs, the individual contributions should be relatively equal. One possibility is to work together tonight, then finish separately (to avoid communication difficulties).

Main Assignment:

We are building one piece of an university registration program. The piece we are starting with is a simplified class to keep track of info about a particular course (I called my version of the class Course). I imagine that we would LATER build a Sections class that would represent a particular offering of a course, and a Student class that would keep track of a student and sections that they have registered for. You are to build the Course class, and also write a main program (probably part of the same class) that will test out the capabilities of the class (thoroughly).

The Course class should be able to keep track of the department, course number, title, number of credits, and a set of prerequisites for the course. It should be able to report whether a given course is a prerequisite for the current (invoking) course. It should allow adding and deleting a prerequisite for the course. It should provide all necessary accessors – inspectors and mutators (‘getters’ and ‘setters’), so that data can all be declared as private. Mutators should protect against bad data getting into objects (e.g. negative credits). Some flexibility should be provided in object creation by providing different constructors. The class should support versions of equals and toString appropriate to the class.

I encourage you to write your main in such a way that will be testing out future use for course scheduling (e.g. create an array of Courses and work with that). I encourage you to keep using my RedmondMsgIn and RedmondMsgOut classes, to get simple GUI look with little code. I don’t want to discourage anybody from doing anything fancier, but remember, that is not part of the current task. Note that cancels on input dialog boxes will not be fully handled until we cover exceptions.

You are free to use more flexible data structures than arrays for the set of prerequisites, but make sure you don’t bite off too much learning for you to chew.

Hand in:

• Disk with an entire folder containing your file, and any other classes that you use, and the corresponding Byte-code files, and any folder structure if more than one package is involved.
• Print out of your code.

Miscellaneous:

· MAKE SURE YOUR PROGRAM WORKS! (i.e. more than just removing compile errors). Your program needs to be able to handle any valid inputs, and catch invalid values of the correct type (for now (until we cover exceptions), we won’t catch invalid values that are the wrong type (e.g. letters where numbers are needed)).

· Make sure that your main demonstrates that your class methods work.

· Put YOUR NAME, and e-mail address in comments at the beginning of the program.

· Remember: Indentation, meaningful variable names, and meaningful comments. Weaknesses in any of these could result in points off. You MUST include comments that explain your program in order to get full credit.