CAB201 Mates Rent a Car

INTRODUCTION

This assignment aims to give you a real problem-solving experience, similar to what you might encounter in the workplace. You have been hired to complete a prototype for a project that has not been fully specified at this stage. There is some supporting documentation to the project in addition to this document. You are required to deliver a working prototype by the required date.

THE TASK

For this assignment your task is to develop a program for a car rental company called Mates Rates Rent a Car (MRRC) to help the operators of the company more efficiently manage their fleet of cars and their customers.

The operators of MRRC require the following functionality:

1. Enter/modify/delete customers
2. Enter/modify/delete cars
3. Search for suitable vehicles based on customers' requests
4. Rent out cars to customers
5. Return cars from customers
6. Display a rented cars report

It offers vehicles in 4 classes -

• Economy
• Family
• Luxury
• Commercial

Vehicles have various traits. A Vehicle class defines the shared properties and methods of all cars and support specialised properties and methods. For instance, luxury cars have GPS and opening roof, and commercial vehicles may have a diesel engine. Number of seats in cars may vary from 2 to 10 (fixed per car though.) Each car has a (possibly) unique rental cost per day.

Customers have various traits. A Customer class defines the shared properties and methods of all customers. Attributes required are Name (with suitably defined sub-fields), and Date of birth (with suitably defined sub-fields).

These classes are used by:

A Fleet class manages the rental of vehicles. The fleet class should load the vehicle fleet from file on start-up. This class should be based on an array of Vehicle objects. It should support operations on the fleet (e.g. add/modify/delete)

A CRM class manages the collection of customers. The CRM class should load the customers from file on start-up. This class should be based on an array of Customer objects. It should support operations on the Customer (e.g. add/modify/delete)

Both the Fleet and CRM classes should save their data to disk when the program is closed by the operator.

Upon start-up, the program has to load the Fleet (vehicles) and CRM (customers) from permanent storage on disk files. During operation the in-memory system is used to manage all operations. When the program is finished it must save the Fleet and CRM data to disk.

NOTE: There is no requirement to back up the data to disk in case the program is not terminated correctly. However, the program should work correctly if started and stopped any number of times, and preserve the state of the CRM and Fleet.

Graphical User Interface:

You are required to create a graphical user interface for this program using Windows Forms. The design of this GUI is largely up to you, however it should be functional and relatively simple, and should allow operators to complete all required functions.

The program should allow the operator to

1. Enter a new customer
2. Modify an existing customer
3. Delete a customer - but not if having a car rented at present
4. Enter a new vehicle
5. Modify an existing vehicle
6. Delete a vehicle but not if the vehicle is rented at present
7. Search for a suitable car based on a customer's request (see the search capabilities section)
8. Rent a car to a customer
9. Return a car from a customer
10. Produce a report (to the screen) of all rented vehicles with option to:
a. order by customer name
b. order by vehicle registration

It is required that you use Windows Forms, rather than any other GUI technologies such as WPG, XNA, or web pages. This means that Visual Studio for Mac and MonoDevelop will likely be insufficient - you will need to ensure that you have access to Visual Studio in order to work on this assignment.

Search capabilities:

The search capabilities of the MRRC program offers various levels of functionality.

The following are just some examples.

Many more queries of the same types are possible.

There could be more/other attributes in queries.

Queries are in free text form, but only allow attribute values, and the operators AND,OR,(). (Note - queries should not be case sensitive).

Example queries:

1. Any

offer any available car in the fleet

2. Any vehicle at given cost range

offer any available car in the fleet within a specified cost range

3. Single attribute query

Red
Family
8-Seater
6-cylinders
V8
GPS
(any single attribute – assume each attribute name is unique in the entire system)

4. A choice between two attributes (disjunction)

Family OR Luxury
Red OR Blue
GPS OR V8

5. A combination of two attributes (conjunction)

Red AND 4-cylinders
GPS AND V8

6. A choice between any number of attributes (disjunction)

Economy OR Family OR Luxury
Red OR Blue OR Green OR Purple
6-cylinders OR V8 OR Luxury

7. A combination of any number of attributes (conjunction)

Red AND 4-cylinders AND GPS
GPS AND V8 AND Red AND Commercial

8. A combination of any number of attributes, using both AND and OR with AND having the same priority (precedence) as OR

Economy OR Family AND 4-Cylinders
Red OR Blue OR Green OR Purple AND GPS

9. A combination of any number of attributes, using AND and OR with AND having a higher priority than OR, supporting parenthesis to resolve priority

((GPS AND V8) OR (Red OR Green)) AND Commercial OR Luxury

The system should allow the operator to select a vehicle from the search results and rent it to a customer. Calculate cost based on rate and duration of rental.

Rented vehicles cannot be rented again until returned.

The system should allow the customer to return a vehicle at any time.

CLASS SPECIFICATION

The following provides a partial specification of the classes required to create a prototype for the MRRC program. For all classes you may implement additional private methods and parameters. You may also implement additional public methods and parameters where appropriate and necessary to complete the functionality. For example, you may want to implement additional public methods in the Vehicle class which assist in the search functionality.

For each class, getters and setters may be replaced with appropriate Properties. In general getters and setters are not specified.

public class Vehicle

The vehicle class should have appropriate getters and setters for each attribute, or C# Properties can be used. You may want to add additional methods to enable searching.

VehicleClass, FuelType, and TransmissionType should be appropriately defined enums.

public Vehicle(string vehicleRego, VehicleClass vehicleClass, string make, string model, int year, int numSeats, TransmissionType transmissionType, FuelType fuelType, bool GPS, bool sunRoof, double dailyRate, string colour)

This constructor provides values for all parameters of the vehicle.

public Vehicle(vehicleRego string, Class class, string make, string model, int year)

This constructor provides only the mandatory parameters of the vehicle. Others are set based on the defaults of each class.

Overall defaults: Unless otherwise specified by the class, vehicles default to four seats, automatic transmission, petrol fuel, no GPS, no sun roof, and a black colour. Economy vehicles: have automatic transmission only.

Default rental cost per day is $50

Family vehicles: can have manual or automatic transmission. Default rental cost per day is $80

Luxury vehicles: has GPS and a sunroof. Default rental cost per day is $120 Commercial vehicle: has diesel engine by default. Default rental cost per day is $130

public string ToCSVString()

This method should return a CSV representation of the vehicle that is consistent with the provided data files.

public override string ToString()

This method should return a string representation of the attributes of the vehicle.

public List< string> GetAttributeList()

This method should return a list of strings which represent each attribute. Values should be made to be unique, e.g. numSeats should not be written as '4' but as 4- Seater, sunroof should not be written as True but as sunroof or with no string added if there is no sunroof. Vehicle rego, class, make, model, year, transmission type, fuel type, daily rate, and colour can all be assumed to not overlap (i.e. if the make Mazda exists, Mazda will not exist in other attributes e.g. there is no model named Mazda. Similarly, if the colour red exists, there is no red make. You do not need to maintain this restriction, only assume it is true.)

An alternative approach can be taken to the Vehicle class for additional marks. In this approach, the Vehicle class should be an abstract class, and each Class of car (economy, family, luxury, commercial) should extend the Vehicle class. Appropriate constructors should be set which make use of the default values of the different classes.

The Customer class should have appropriate getters and setters for each attribute, or C# Properties can be used. You may want to add additional methods to enable your approach to searching.

Gender should be an appropriately defined enum.

public Customer(int customerID, string title, string firstNames, string lastName, Gender gender, string dateOfBirth)

This constructor should construct a customer with the provided attributes.

public string ToCSVString()

This method should return a CSV representation of the customer that is consistent with the provided data files.

public override string ToString()

This method should return a string representation of the attributes of the customer.

public class Fleet

A Fleet class manages the rental of vehicles. The fleet class should load the vehicle fleet from file on start-up. This class should be based on list of Vehicle objects. It should support operations on the fleet, such as adding, modifying and deleting vehicles. It should also handle the renting and returning of vehicles.

You may adjust some private variables or methods if they better suit your approach. For example, you may prefer to take a different approach to the Dictionary with the vehicle rego and customerID for maintaining which cars are being rented.

The methods needed to implement the search functionality have not been specified here. It is up to you to come up with your own approach.

The program must make sure that data entry makes sure that VehicleRego is unique (no duplicates allowed) and that it only has 6 alphanumeric characters (i.e. in [A- Z,0-9]) when entered from the keyboard. You can assume that data on disk (i.e. read from files) is always valid.

public Fleet()

If there is no fleet file at the specified location, this constructor constructors an empty fleet and empty rentals. Otherwise it loads the fleet and rentals from the appropriate files.

public bool AddVehicle(Vehicle vehicle)

This method adds the provided vehicle to the fleet assuming the vehicle registration does not already exist. It returns true if the add was successful (the vehicleRego wasn't already in the fleet), and false otherwise (a car with that rego was already in the fleet).

public bool RemoveVehicle(Vehicle vehicle)

This method removes the provided vehicle from the fleet if it is not currently rented. It returns true if the removal was successful and false otherwise.

public bool RemoveVehicle(string vehicleRego)

This method removes the vehicle with the provided rego from the fleet if it is not currently rented. It returns true if the removal was successful and false otherwise.

public List< Vehicle> GetFleet()

This method returns the fleet.

public List< Vehicle> GetFleet(bool rented)

This method returns a subset of vehicles in the fleet depending on whether they are currently rented. If rented is true, this method returns all rented vehicles. If it false, this method returns all not yet rented vehicles.

public bool IsRented(string vehicleRego)

This method returns whether the vehicle with the provided registration is currently being rented.

public bool IsRenting(int customerID)

This method returns whether the customer with the provided customer ID is currently renting a vehicle.

public int RentedBy(string vehicleRego)

This method returns the customer ID of the current renter of the vehicle. If it is rented by no one, it returns -1.

public bool RentCar(string vehicleRego, int customerID)

This method rents the vehicle with the provided registration to the customer with the provided ID, if the vehicle is not currently being rented. It returns true if the rental was possible, and false otherwise.

public int ReturnCar(string vehicleRego)

This method returns a vehicle. If the return is successful (it was currently being rented) it returns the customer ID of the customer who was renting it, otherwise it returns -1.

public void SaveToFile()

This method saves the current state of the fleet to file.

public void LoadFromFile()

This method loads the state of the fleet from file.

public class CRM

A CRM class manages the collection of customers. The CRM class should load the customers from file on start-up. This class should be based on a list of Customer objects. It should support operations on the Customer (e.g. add/modify/delete).

The program must make sure that data entry makes sure that customerID is unique (no duplicates allowed). You can assume that data on disk (i.e. read from files) is always valid. You may want to implement this by automatically generating a unique customerID (for example, you might want to keep track of the current highest customer ID).

public CRM()

If there is no CRM file at the specified location, this constructor constructors an empty CRM with no customers. Otherwise it loads the customers from file.

public bool AddCustomer(Customer customer)

This method adds the provided customer to the customer list if the customer ID doesn't already exist in the CRM. It returns true if the addition was successful (the customer ID wasnt already in the CRM) and false otherwise (the customer ID was already in the CRM).

public bool RemoveCustomer(Customer customer, Fleet fleet)

This method removes the customer from the CRM if they are not currently renting a vehicle. It returns true if the removal was successful, otherwise it returns false.

public bool RemoveCustomer(int customerID, Fleet fleet)

This method removes the customer from the CRM if they are not currently renting a vehicle. It returns true if the removal was successful, otherwise it returns false.

public List< Customers> GetCustomers()

This method returns the list of current customers.

public void SaveToFile()

This method saves the current state of the CRM to file.

public void LoadFromFile()

This method loads the state of the CRM from file.

RECOMMENDED APPROACH

Tackling a large project such as this assignment may initially seem daunting, however breaking it down into smaller tasks that can be implemented and tested will make the task much more manageable and is an important skill for professional practice. You will develop this assignment as a bottom-up implementation exercise. This means that you will work based off a specification that has already been prepared and implement classes and methods, one by one, first implementing those classes and methods that don't rely on other classes to operate, then implementing the classes and methods that rely on those and so forth.

This assignment specification has been released as we cover the development of Windows Forms and event driven programming. There is a significant amount of work that can (and should) be done prior to beginning work on the GUI. It is strongly recommended that you attend the practicals for support. Begin with writing the simplest classes one by one, and creating a Console application in which you can test each class and its methods as you implement them. All functionality of the assignment can be tested via a console application - the GUI simply provides a wrapper to this functionality.

Note that the GUI is often developed separately from the detailed functionality, by different programmers, as a team effort. It is here where the value of OOP is demonstrated. A good place to start is the definition of the CRM and Vehicle classes, and load/save the data to disk, with a console interaction while you test it. The console interaction can later be implemented in a GUI.