CSC1251: Learning about procedural programming, control structures, arrays, dynamic memory allocation and handling input/output: Advanced Programming Assignment, UOW, Singapore

Aim

The objectives of this assignment includes:

• Learning about procedural programming, control structures, arrays, dynamic memory allocation and handling input/output.

• Apply the concepts learnt by developing a Weather Information Processing System

Background

Your software company, Virtual Solutions, has just won a $1m contract to design a build a prototype Weather Information Processing System (WIPS).
For this assignment, you take on the role of a software architect. You are supplied with sample input weather data (kindly provided by the meteorological station), and you need to develop a program that does the following:

1) read in and process a configuration file

2) display city map

3) display cloud coverage map (cloudiness index)

4) display cloud coverage map (LMH symbols)

5) display atmospheric pressure map (pressure index)

6) display atmospheric pressure map (LMH symbols)

7) show weather forecast summary report

The program should be compiled as Icsci251 al .exes and run in Ubuntu 14.04 (Linux OS). The next section describes the requirements for the program.

Task Requirements

A) Upon startup, the program should prompt user to enter a ‘configuration’ filename. The program then proceeds to read the contents (of the entered filename) to further initialize its own program parameters / data structures. Please refer to Appendix A, which provides details on the configuration file and its usage.

B) The meteorological station has adopted a map-grid coordinate system upon which it overlays all other weather data. With regards to display city map option, please refer to Appendix B, which elaborates on this coordinate system, the unit representation, the relative positioning of different cities and its display requirements.

C) For the display requirements of cloud coverage (cloudiness index), AND cloud coverage (LMH symbols) (i.e. options 3) & 4)), please refer to Appendix C, which will discuss about the interpretation of cloud cover input data, its subsequent processing algorithm and output format requirements.

D) For the display requirements of atmospheric pressure (pressure index) AND atmospheric pressure (LMH symbols) (i.e. options 5) & 6)), please refer to Appendix D, which will discuss about the interpretation of pressure input data, its subsequent processing algorithm and output format requirements.

E) For the display requirements of weather forecast summary report, please refer to Appendix E, which will provide details about the kind of summarized weather data to be displayed, processing algorithm to compute the probability of rain and its graphical display format.

F) Refer to Appendix F, for a description of the program’s main menu requirements

G) Once the program is completed and tested to be working successfully, you are encouraged to add on “new features” to the program that you feel are relevant to the problem. Additional marks may be awarded subject to the relevancy and correctness of the new functionalities. ( Note : the additional features will only be considered IF the program has correctly fulfilled all the basic requirements elaborated in the earlier sections! )

H) You are not allowed to declare your own C++ classes for this program, as this is a purely procedural (not Object Oriented) programming assignment!

I) You are to use only C++ language to develop your program. There is no restriction on the IDE as long as your source files can be compiled by g++ compiler (that comes installed in Tutor’s Ubuntu Linux) and executed in the Ubuntu terminal shell environment.