Project 7 Designing and implementing classes

1. Problem Statement:
The primary goal of this programming assignment is to give students experience
designing and implementing classes. To do this, students will design the interface
for a calendar “Date” class, and produce a “skeleton implementation” of this class,
where the methods all print a message with the name of the method. Detailed
requirements are listed below:
• Your first task is to decide what pieces of information you want to store in
each object. Once you have done this, you need to create appropriate
variables and put them in the appropriate place in the Date class definition in
the “date.h” file.
• Your second task is to decide what operations to perform on each Date
object. Naturally you will want some form of “get” and “set” methods. In
addition to these methods, you should invent three other methods that
perform useful operations on Date objects. For all methods, you will need to
decide what parameters are needed, and what the method will return. Put
the function prototypes for all of your methods in the appropriate place in
the Date class definition in the “date.h” file.
• Your next task is to create a “skeleton implementation” of all of the methods
in the “date.h” class in a new file called “date.cpp”. Each method should have
comments explaining what the purpose of the method is, and each method
could have cout statements that print out the name of the method, and any
parameters that are passed into the method.
• Your final task is to create a very basic main program at the bottom of the
“date.cpp” file who’s only purpose is to create several Date objects and call
each of the methods in the Date class several times. Because you only have a
skeleton implementation above, your program will not do any real work, but
it will print out messages that prove that your methods above are getting
called and are receiving parameters correctly.
2. Design:
For this assignment, most of your work will be in designing the Date class described
above. You should model your design on other classes we have spoken about in
class or on the class website. Your goal here is to come up with sensible names for
private variables and public methods, and to decide what parameters all of these
methods will require.3. Implementation:
You are starting this programming project with a blank piece of paper, so you do not
need to worry about interfacing with existing code. When implementing your
project, you should model your “date.h” and “date.cpp” files on other examples you
have seen in class. Remember the easiest way to create a skeleton implementation
is to copy/paste the function prototypes from “date.h” into “date.cpp” and add the
code to print messages. Since you are not actually creating a full implementation of
each method, be sure to include a descriptive comment to explain what each method
is expected to do.
As always, it is very important to make changes incrementally one feature at a time,
writing comments, adding code, compiling, and debugging. This way, you always
have a program that "does something" even if it is not complete.
4. Testing:
Test your program to check that it operates correctly for all of the requirements
listed above. Also check for the error handling capabilities of the code. Try your
program with several input values, and save your testing output in text files for
inclusion in your project report.
5. Documentation:
When you have completed your C++ program, write a short report using the
“Programming Project Report Template” describing what the objectives were, what
you did, and the status of the program. Does it work properly for all test cases? Are
there any known problems?