Payroll Program

COSC 1320 - C++ Programming
Bob Comer, Professor, CIT/COSC

Assignment 7 - Payroll (Last time)

Be sure to read through page 720 of Chapter 15 (Pointers, etc.) before beginning this assignment. In assignment 6 you defined a class to represent the information for one employee, and used an array of class objects to hold the employee 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 to represent the master file. Then dynamically allocate one employee object at a time as the employee data as is read in.

Rewrite your Payroll program from Assignment 6 to dynamically allocate the memory used to store the employee information from the master file. Use an array of pointers to employee objects. Each employee object will be dynamically allocated to hold the master file data.

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

Hints

I am not asking you to use a dynamic array (as described in Chapter 15 of your textbook). An array of pointers is not the same as a dynamic array.

In the Example C++ Programs section of this web site 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

Return to C++ Home Page