Implement a menu driven real estate catalogue system that allows users to perform various catalogue maintenance and search tasks. You are only allowed to use the C programming language. You are not allowed to use C++.
Please use the "AssignTemplate.c" file found inside the Assignment Folder of LMS as the basis for your solution. If you follow that template you will not go far wrong.
Please do not use global variables. Up to 50% of marks will be lost for assignments that use global variables.
Please do functional decomposition. Up to 50% of marks will be lost for students who try to write the entire program in one main function or something similar. There should be at least 5 functions for the assignment. One function for each task 2 to 4. Two functions for task 5. More functions than 5 is highly recommended. The aim of this rule is to teach you how to pass pointer arguments into functions.
Task 1
The program should be menu driven. The user should be presented with the following menu:
1. Load catalogue from file
2. Save catalogue to file
3. Display catalogue
4. Search property from catalogue
5. Quit
After selecting one of the above options the corresponding task should be performed. After completing the selected task, the menu should be displayed again for the user to choose again unless the 5th option is chosen.
Task
Implement the load catalogue from file menu option. After selecting this option the user should be asked to enter the name of a file to be loaded. The file should then be loaded into an array of structures. The array of structures should have been declared in the main function before the load catalogue function was called. To get full marks for this task you should use run-time (dynamically) allocated memory for the array of structures. If you use static memory allocation you will lose 5 marks. You can assume the file will have the following format (note you can find an example input file inside the assignment folder called "example_input.txt", make sure your program at least works with that file).
[Number of properties]
[Address of property]
[Real estate agent firstname], [Real estate agent surname]
[Number of bedrooms]
[Price of property]
...
...
[Address of property]
[Real estate agent firstname], [Real estate agent surname]
[Number of bedrooms]
[Price of property]
The ... stands for intermediate catalogue entries.
You can assume the property address string to be a maximum of 200 characters.
The firstname and surname strings have a maximum of 100 characters each.
Here is an explanation of the above fields:
[Number of properties] - This is the number of properties stored in the file
[Address of property] - A string specifying the address of the property, the string may contain spaces, punctuation, and numbers. However the entire address is specified in one line. Hint: you can use fgets to read in a whole line at a time. Use stdin as the file pointer, since you are taking input from the keyboard.
[Real estate agent first name], [Real estate agent last surname] - Two strings which do not contain spaces but are separated by a comma followed by a space.
[Number of bedrooms] - A number specifying the number of bedrooms in the property
[Price of property] - Price of the property, it may contain a decimal point.
Below is an example of a catalogue file that contains 2 properties:
2
32 Bugden Ave, Forest Hill, VIC 3108
Peter, Kernighan
3
602000.82
292 Smith St, Blackburn, ACT 3920
2
222292.84
If the sample file is copied from windows XP into putty. You my need to use the following command to change the format of the file from windows to unix:
dos2unix