Payroll Program

CIS 2003 - Introduction to C++ and C Programming
Bob Comer, Professor, CIS/CSC

Assignment 7 - Payroll Program

In assignment 6 you defined a class or a struct to represent the master file information for one employee. Most students used an array of employee objects (or structs) to store the master file. If the actual number of employees is much smaller than the array size, this would waste a lot of memory. One way around this problem is to use an array of pointers to employee objects (or structs) to hold the master file. Then dynamically allocate one employee object (or struct) at a time as the employee data as is read in.

In the Example C++ Programs section of this website there are several example programs that illustrate using arrays of structs, arrays of objects, and arrays of pointers to structs or objects:

Arrays of structs, sequential search	itemstru.cpp	itemfile.txt
Arrays of pointers to structs with DMA	itemptr.cpp	itemfile.txt
Arrays of objects, sequential search	itemclass.cpp	itemfile.txt
Arrays of pointers to objects with DMA	itemptr2.cpp	itemfile.txt

Rewrite your Payroll program from Assignment 6 to dynamically allocate the memory used to store the employee information from the master file.

Most likely this means that you will use an array of pointers to employee objects (or structs) that will be dynamically allocated to hold the master file data.
Because the master file and the transaction file for this assignment are both sorted on the employee id, it is possible to write the program without storing the master file in an array. If this is how you did assignment 6, you will just need to use one dynamically allocated employee object (or struct) for assignment 7.

Your new program should produce the same output as the previous version.

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