The Objective

The Background

For this project, you will be keeping track of the cars found in one train. For each of the cars, there is a car identification number, the cargo being carried, the origin and destination, the number of miles being travelled from the origin to the destination, the weight of the items in the car in pounds, and the cost of shipping that car full of product.

You will also need to keep some information about the entire train. You'll need to know the number of cars in the train, the total weight of everything being shipped and the total shipping cost associated with the cars in this train.

The Task

More details

• You must use the following structure definition : typedef struct car { int carNum; char cargo[LENGTH]; char origin[LENGTH]; char destination[LENGTH]; int weight; int miles; float cost; }CAR; where LENGTH has been #defined to be 12. The car number, cargo, origin, destination, weight in pounds, and miles for each car are contained in the file. The cost must be calculated using the appropriate rate for that car's cargo, its weight in tons (not pounds) and the number of miles. The cost should be in dollars.

• The shipping rates in cents per ton-mile are : autos : 16.5 coal : 29.1 cattle : 52.5 hogs : 63.1 eggs : 75.9
• You must read the information in from the cars.dat file and use it to fill an array of CAR structures. You are to use the C file-handling functions for this project. The first item in the file is the number of cars. You must use this number to dynamically allocate the memory needed to hold your array of structures. After that initial integer which is the number of cars, the data consists of the car id number, the cargo, the origin, the destination, the weight, and the miles for each car. The last member of the structure, cost, is not contained in the file and must be calculated as described earlier.

• You must then generate a report that shows all of the information for each of the cars and the train totals. It doesn't have to look exactly like the sample, but the numbers should agree and all of the same information needs to be shown. It must also fit within an 80-character wide screen.
  

• You MUST must have a function called FindTotals and you must use the following function prototype for that function without altering it in any way : void FindTotals(CAR* train, int numCars, float* costPtr, float* wtPtr);

• You must then produce an ascii drawing of the train, with some of the information about each of the cars being shown inside the boxcar itself. Each boxcar must contain the car's id number, its cargo and its destination. You may assume that the cars are in the train in the order that they are read in from the file. When drawing the train you should use an arrow as the coupler between cars to indicate the direction in which the train is travelling. The drawing of the train must be accomplished within an 80-character wide screen. This means that unless the data file is extremely short, the drawing of train will have to be continued on lower lines. See the sample output and note that a train which is 12 cars long has to be printed in three sections. The first section has 5 cars, the second has 5 cars and the last section has the remaining 2 cars. The printing of the train is the major problem-solving portion of this project and as such will carry a fairly high points value.

• The data file, cars.dat, is a sample data file. It has the same format as the data files that we will use to test your projects. You should realize that other data files may contain no cars or many more cars than this sample file and your project must work properly for all files with this format, regardless of the number of cars in that file.

The data files

The data file is cars.dat, which can be viewed from this link. You should NOT view it and save it into a file or cut and paste it from the browser into a file. Either of these methods of obtaining the file may cause there to be extraneous characters in the file that your program will try to read and disrupt the input of your data. Instead you must copy the file from my directory into the directory that you'll be using to work on this project.

Go to that directory and then issue the following commands exactly :

cp /afs/umbc.edu/users/b/o/bogar/pub/cars.dat .

The space and the . (dot) at the end of each command are necessary and a part of the command.

Sample Output

Since the output file is large, instead of showing the output here, I am just providing a link to my output file, output

Although your output may look different than mine, you should print out the same information and of course the format of the train drawing must be extremely similar, if not identical, to mine.

What to Turn In

You must use separate compilation for this project. You'll find that the functions you write for this project are all project specific, but there are too many to put them all in the proj3.c file with main(). So for this project, you should have a file, called proj3.c, that contains only the function main(). You should also have a train.c file that contains the function definitions. The structure definition belongs in train.h before the function prototypes.

Submit as follows:

submit cs201 Proj3 proj3.c train.c train.h

The order in which the files are listed doesn't matter. However, you must make sure that all files necessary to compile your project are listed.