EECS 183 Labs

EECS 183 Lab 7: Classes

Lab due on your scheduled lab day (October 27 - 30)

Lab accepted for full credit until Monday, November 2, 11:59 pm Eastern

In this lab, you are writing code to master the use of classes. You will complete part of Project 4 in the lab.

By completing this lab assignment, you will learn:

You should complete this lab in small groups of about four students. For all labs in EECS 183, to receive a grade, every student must individually submit the Lab assignment.

Starter Files

You can download the starter files using this link.

After downloading and unzipping, you will find the following files in the starter-files folder:

IMPORTANT: For this lab, you must include all files in a single project in Xcode or Visual Studio.

IMPORTANT: Do not change any part of the header files Position.h or utility.h.

Lab Assignment

Tasks to Complete

To complete this lab, you need to do the following steps:

  1. Start a new project with your IDE using all of the starter files.
  2. Set up your project so that it can read and write text files. See File I/O below.
  3. Write your test cases in test.cpp to test the functions you will implement in Position.cpp.
  4. Write the implementations for the functions in Position.cpp.
  5. Test your functions using the test cases you have written.
  6. Submit your Position.cpp, test.cpp, grid1.txt, and grid2.txt to the autograder. Your tests must expose the bugs in our buggy implementations.
    • NOTE: grid1.txt and grid2.txt are optional to submit to the autograder. They may help you with your test cases for the lab.

Position.cpp

IMPORTANT: This is the same file you will use for Project 4: Battleship. Once you complete the lab you may use your lab solutions for Project 4.

IMPORTANT: A Position of (1,A) will be stored as having a row being 0 and a col being 0

test.cpp

NOTE: grid1.txt contains positions in the (row,col) form only. grid2.txt contains positions in both the (row,col) and rowcol forms. Use both files to test your Position::read() function. To test Position::write(), write positions to an ofstream, then read them back in and print them.

Bugs To Expose

There are a total of 4 unique bugs to find in our implementations of the Position member functions. Your tests will need to expose all of the bugs to receive full points for the lab. The autograder will tell you the names of the bugs that you have exposed, from the following set:

HINT: Read the RME for each member function in Position.h carefully and test the edge cases it describes: rows and columns outside the grid, lowercase column letters, and both forms of input.

File I/O

File Locations - Xcode

Follow along with the steps below to set up your Xcode project the right way.

NOTE: The steps and videos below were created for project 4. The process is exactly the same for the lab, there will just be a different set of starter files.

This video tutorial shows how to create your project.

There are a few things that must be done for Xcode. First, ensure that Derived Data is stored relative to your project folder. Select Xcode > Settings… (may be called Preferences in older versions of Xcode) in the menu bar, click on Locations, then select Build Location, then select Custom, and finall select the option Relative to Derived Data. This will ensure that executables are saved in your Project folder. Note that the folder names will be different on your machine.

xcode settings

xcode relative

Then, tell Xcode to look for files in the folder where all other project files are stored. From the menu bar, choose Product > Scheme > Edit Scheme.

xcode edit scheme

Select Run on the left, Options on top and then select the checkbox Use custom working directory and navigate to your Project folder where you will store input files.

xcode working directory

Now you can place input txt files right with your .h and .cpp files.

NOTE: If you move your project folder, you’ll have to reset the project’s working directory.

Visual Studio

Following the instructions for Setting Up Project 1 in the Getting Started with Visual Studio document will put the starter files in the correct folder. The only difference from Project 1 is that there are more starter files to add. These steps are replicated for project 4 in the video below. This process is the same for this lab, there will just be a different set of starter files.

This video tutorial shows how to create your project.

NOTE: The steps and videos below were created for project 4. The process is exactly the same for the lab, there will just be a different set of starter files.

Verifying File IO and Project Setup

It is imperative that your Xcode/Visual studio project is set up correctly to read and write text files. Be sure to edit the scheme for Xcode and that the files are in the correct directory in Visual Studio.

Here is a test case that you can add to your test.cpp to check if your text files, like grid1.txt and grid2.txt, are in the correct directory. Be sure to call fileCheck in your startTests function!

void fileCheck() {

    // open one of the text files that are part of the starter code
    ifstream ins;
    ins.open("grid1.txt");

    // if the file was not in the correct directory, the stream state is fail
    if (ins.fail()) {
        cout << "Could not open grid1.txt" << endl;
    }
    else {
        cout << "Success! Text files are in the right directory." << endl;
    }
    ins.close();
    
    return;
}

If you get the message "Could not open grid1.txt" try editing the scheme again (Mac) or checking that you have the project files in the correct directory (Windows).

If you cannot get the text files in the correct directory, then try adding the following to your fileCheck test.

// if the file is not in the right directory, try this:
ofstream outs;
outs.open("crazyfilename");
outs << "find the file named crazyfilename in windows explorer or finder";
outs.close();

Then open Windows Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) and search for the file named crazyfilename. Once you find the folder with that file name, copy all of the .txt files from the project starter files to that directory. Then try the fileCheck test again.

How to Submit

IMPORTANT: For all labs in EECS 183, to receive a grade, every student must individually submit the Lab Submission. Late submissions for Labs will not be accepted for credit.