Assignment 6: A Practical Application of C

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Due Friday, December 7, 2018 by 11:59pm ET

Points 350

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Part 2: Defining the Problem and your Approach Towards Finding a Solution (75 points)

The following is very much a real-world example (though scaled down so that it will be possible for you to complete the assignment in the time that is left in this semester) of a problem that you could solve using C.

The Problem

Given a small database of person accounts, determine which set of accounts in that database are authorized to access a resource and should therefore be sent to the appropriate destination "system" based on the roles associated with those accounts.

The database will contain person records, roles, resources (and by resource I mean a system, service or tool that requires a person to have a specific role in order to access it), a mapping of the roles to people, and a mapping of the roles to resources. This should be all of the information that you need in order to programmatically make the determination about which accounts are authorized.

Each destination "system" that I mentioned can just be a location in local memory (again, for the sake of keeping the scale manageable). When writing to these locations, you will need to allocate memory, write to it, and have a way to maintain it. You should not need these specific implementation details to to come up with a preliminary solution design though.

Designing a Solution

For this part of the assignment, you should not be programming anything. Instead, you should make sure that you understand the functional details of this assignment.

It should also be an opportunity for you to examine your approach to problem solving. The number one reason that I've seen students (and even professionals) fail to complete an assignment or task is because they did not understand what the problem was asking and the steps they needed to take in order to solve the problem. If you take the time to document and think about your design and approach, I do not think that you will find yourself in a place where you are unable to complete this assignment.

For this part of the assignment, how you present your design is up to you. A couple of options are to create a process flow diagram or to create a specification document of some kind, such as a scaled down version of a software requirements specification (SRS) document (some things that normally go into an SRS document, just aren't applicable or aren't worth spending too much time on because of the limited scale of this assignment.