1. Learner Objectives:
At the conclusion of this programming assignment, participants should be able to:
* Design and implement a dynamic doubly linked list
* Allocate and de-allocate memory at runtime
* Manipulate links in a dynamic list
* Insert items into a dynamic linked list
* Delete items from a dynamic linked list
* Edit items in a dynamic linked list
* Traverse a dynamic linked list
II. Prerequisites:
Before starting this programming assignment, participants should be able to:
* Analyze a basic set of requirements for a problem
* Compose C language programs
* Compile a program using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
* Create basic test cases for a program
* Apply arrays, strings, and pointers
* Summarize differences between array notation and pointer notation
* Apply pointer arithmetic
* Apply basic string handling library functions
* Define and implement structures in C
* Summarize the operations of a linked list
III. Overview & Requirements:
Many of us have large digital music collections that are not always very well organized. It would be nice to have a program that would arrange our music collection based attributes such as artist, album title, song title, genre, song length, number times played, and rating. For this assignment you will write a digital music manager (DMM).
Your DMM program must have a text-based interface which allows the user to select from a menu of options including: load, store, display, insert, delete, edit, sort, rate, and exit. The "load" option reads records from a file into a dynamic doubly linked list. The "store" command writes records, in a dynamic doubly linked list, to a file. "Display" prints records, and its attributes to the screen. This command must print either all records or a single record based on a search field. A search field may be any of the attributes belonging to a record. If a search field matches multiple records, then print the first match to the screen. The "insert" option collects information for each new song record and attributes from the user. The new song record must be placed into the list based on a selected sort option. By default, songs are inserted into the list alphabetically ('a' - 'z') according to artist. Other possible "sort" options include alphabetical ordering based on genre, or increasing numeric value based on rating. "Delete" removes a record from the list. Deletion is based on song title. The "edit" option must allow the user to find a record in the list with any search field. The user may modify any of the attributes in the record. The "rate" action must allow the user to assign a value of 1 - 5 to a song; 1 is the lowest rating and 5 is the highest rating. Lastly, "exit" saves the most recent list to a file.
A record is a struct type which consists of the following attributes:
* Artist - a string
* Album title - a string
* Song title - a string
* Genre - a string
* Song length - a struct type consisting of seconds and minutes, both integers
* Number times played - an integer
* Rating - an integer (1 - 5)
IV. Logical Block Diagram
The logical block diagram for your doubly linked list should look like the following:
As you can see from the illustration a doubly linked list has a pointer to the next node and the previous node in the list. The first node's previous node pointer is always NULL and the last node's next pointer is always NULL. When you insert and delete nodes from a doubly linked list, you must always carefully link the previous and next pointers.