ACOM1900: Coursework 3

Submission deadline: 9am, Mon 28th April 2008

Task

You have been asked to write a programme that allows users to search a database of academic papers, which is provided in a text file. The file is tab-delimited and has the following columns:

• Author(s) [NB: if there is more than one author then they are separated by a ';']
• Year of publication
• Paper title
• Journal (or conference)

Two example data files are provided to help you test your software. One contains valid data, and the other contains incomplete data. Similar data files will be used to mark your coursework.

Functionality and marking

The assignment is worth 40% of the assessment for ACOM1900, and your solution should be a robust piece of software (implement error handling for both reading the data and handling user input) that makes effective use of functions. The marks are broken down as follows:

• Read the data (if the data file is incomplete then print an appropriate error message and then exit the programme) and store it so that each piece of information (e.g., an author's name or a journal name) is only stored in one place (15 marks)
• Interface that allows a user to output only papers by an author whose name contains a given string, or from a journal that contains a givenn string. Each paper should be output in the form (20 marks)
• Professionalism: header, comments and sensible variable names in your code (5 marks)

An effective way of storing the data is to use the following three lists:

• List of journals (each journal's 'index' is its position in the list)
• List of authors (each author's 'index' is its position in the list)
• List of papers (each paper's entry is its title, year published, the index of each author(s) and the index of the journal; in this way the name of each journal and author is only stored in one place).

For the interface, I recommend you prompt the user as follows and then process the user input to perform the search:
Search on author (A = ***) or journal (J = ***), where *** is any string [Q = quit]:

Each paper should be output in this form: Author(s). (Year). Title. Journal. If there are two authors then their names are separated by an '&' but there is no comma. If there are three or more authors then their names are comma-separated, except for the last two authors who just have an '&' between their names. Examples of the output format are:
Acredolo. (1977). Developmental Changes in Large-Scale Space. Developmental Psychology.
Allen & Ondracek. (1995). Age-sensitive cognitive abilities related to children's acquisition of spatial knowledge. Developmental Psychology.
Aginsky, Harris & Beusmans. (1997). Two strategies for learning a route. Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Submission

The source code for these exercises should be submitted by email (as an attachment) to acom1900@comp.leeds.ac.uk. It must be submitted from a .leeds.ac.uk email address, and include your name and student number in the body of the message.

Roy Ruddle, March 2008