CS3560 Homework 3-4

PSS is a tool that will assist the user to schedule his/her activities. It will take various "tasks" as input and schedule them according to the user's needs. Typical tasks would be attending class, studying, working on assignment, and so on. Typical outputs will be daily, weekly, or monthly schedules. PSS also has commands for storing the list of tasks to a data file, or to read those tasks from a data file.

The user will interact with PSS to enter a new task to the system. There are different types of tasks (see below), but each task will have a start time and a duration. The times and durations should be rounded to the nearest 15 minutes. If the user attempts to create a task that overlaps an existing task, PSS will report the overlap and will not create the new task.

Some of the tasks are recurring tasks. These tasks occur on a repeating basis, from a particular start date to a given end date. For example, one task might be for one hour and 15 minutes, every Tuesday evening at 7:00 p.m., from January 28th to May 5th.

Another type of task is a transient task, which only occurs one time. A third type of task is an anti-task, which cancels out one particular occurence of a recurring task. For example, an anti-task might be set for February 25th, for an hour and 15 minutes starting at 7:00 p.m. This task would need to refer to the recurring task. Note that if an anti-task removes one instance of a recurring task, then a transient task could be scheduled at that same time.

Recurring tasks can be further subdivided into Course, Study, Sleep, Exercise, Work, and Meal. Your group can suggest other types of recurring tasks.

Transient tasks can be further subdivided into Visit, Shopping, and Appointment. You may also add other types of recurring tasks.

Your PSS should use the Model-View-Controller pattern, which we haven't talked about yet, but here is a brief description. Your implementation will have three primary categories of objects: a Model, a Viewer, and a Controller.

● The Model manages the data, which in this case is the list of all of the tasks. The model can be asked to return various lists of tasks, and can be asked to create, edit, or delete tasks. The model makes sure that there are no errors, such as overlapping tasks or tasks that are too large or too small.

● The Viewer (and you may have multiple objects that are Viewers) are used to display some information. This is how the user can see a schedule or a part of a schedule.

● The Controller (and again there might be multiple of these) is the main object that interacts with the user. The controller decides what actions to take.

You will have other classes as well, such as the hierarchy of tasks supported by the system. You may, if you wish, have a class for writing the data to a file, and another class for reading the data. Alternatively, you can have your primary Model class perform these activities.