CS 280 Spring 2009           Assignment 9 – Addendum

Background Knowledge:

• Valid values related to Scores were given in the original assignment handout:
• Month – 1-12
• Date – 1-31
• Year – 1995-2010
• Score – 0-30000
• Level Reached – 0-10
• The partial Player class that I gave you has constants for the min and max handicaps: 0-10. Names cannot be validated.
• It is not necessary to know what game we are talking about. With changes in constants (valid scores, number of levels), this could be used for any game.
• Random PlayerIDs can be generated. In fact the default is that it is (8 long). Notice the initialization of the instance variable in the Player class.
• The setting of a handicap via “Auto-Handicap” is intentionally up to you, to allow some creativity. Note that high handicap is BAD – they need a lot of help, and low handicap is GOOD. Other than that, you can consider how much they’ve played, what their high score is, levels that they’ve reached, average scores, etc
• With such freedom, it is beyond suspicious if any two people come up with the exact same algorithm.

Miscellaneous Details:

• Documentation should be available on the Player and Score classes. It is provided as Javadoc documents, which are html files that can be found inside the project folder included in the zip. The javadoc includes methods that I’ve written, methods I’m asking you to write, and perhaps some that I was going to ask you to write but decided to skip.
• Unfortunately, I did not generate Javadoc for the ID class. However, you can generate it from within NetBeans.
• In general, you would make your GUI class in a different project than the Score and Player project, because the Score and Player classes might be useful in a lot of projects besides yours. (Score and Player fit well in the same project because of the strong relationship (aggregation and dependency) between Score and Player). ID is natural in its own project because it is useful for very many projects. However, as beginners, you may well be better off taking the expedient path and just including all classes in one project and package.  It’s not what you will be wanting to do for later bigger projects, but for getting started …If you do, you might have to change some package and some import statements.
• We’re no longer going to assume that the clerk enters valid and reasonable values.  Note that the info on mutators for the Score class included valid ranges for the instance variables.  Player and Score mutator methods should ensure that valid values are passed and return a Boolean. The GUI class can, if appropriate, call the appropriate mutator and check the return (true or false) as part of checking user inputs. It is the GUI class’s responsibility to give the user a message! (Player and Score should be general enough that we don’t know that a message is always the right thing to do). In an event-driven world – you (the GUI class) can display a one-time message and give control back to the user. Note the next point though!
• Don’t try to calculate anything if the inputs are bad – only display a message and let the user back into control.
• If the user enters letters instead of numbers in numeric text fields, the parse commands will crash. We’re still going to ignore these types of problems. (No need to catch and complain about this). (NOTE also that no entry in a text field is like having non-numeric).
• However, we have talked about exceptions; if you want the extra challenge, you can handle these exceptions.
• The GUI class is showing and not showing various components (controls) based on what makes sense at a given time. The easiest way to do this is to put these components on a jPanel. Then the jPanel can be made visible or not all at once using one statement. (jPanels help to make the GUI neater anyway).
• The dialog box for “See totals” in the initial assignment had a few flaws:
• The handicap was wrong – the wrong run of the program was captured
• Redundant info is included – the GUI code included info (max score, ave score) that is also provided in toString
• It would be nice if the average score was formatted to limit the number of decimal places.