Thread: Election Program

Those requirements are appropriately vague, so unless the file is unusually large I would recommend using a linked list to hold the records in memory then you can move through them easily. Printing the output and only loading records that meet a certain condition is simple enough. I can offer clarification, but I'll need to know what exactly you don't understand.

-Prelude

>basically i'm very confused about how to do any of the
>programming and how to put it all together
You really shouldn't cut class, it's bad for the GPA.

>I know that i have to have a menu with a quit option, help file,
>and the option to view the next, previous, last and first records.
The menu is very easy, most people prefer a switch statement that calls the appropriate functions:

Code:

while ( userSelection != ENDCASE ) {
  /* Print the menu and let 
  ** the user choose an option
  */
  switch ( userSelection )
  {
  case 1: function1(); break;
  case 2: function2(); break;
  .
  .
  case ENDCASE: continue;
  default: error(); break;
  }
}

The quit option simply continues the loop and causes the test to fail.

A help file is also very simple, just create a text file that has all of the information in it and when the user chooses the option to view it, you open the file with fopen and print the contents to the screen.

Viewing the next, previous, first, and last records is simple if your data structure is set up properly. Because this is homework, you can probably get away with using an array. However, to truly impress your teacher and make the program a bit more robust, you should use a double linked list with a head pointer and a tail pointer. This gives you ready access to the current record, the pervious and next records and also the first and last in the list. I won't give you the code for that because you can find it just about anywhere, and this is your assignment, not mine.

Hopefully that helped.

-Prelude