Trouble with C++ Class

Question

I am a teacher at an independent boarding school and am trying to to write a program in C++ that will randomly seat students at tables in our dining hall so that they sit with different students and with different staff members each week. Ideally, over a given period, they would not sit at the same table twice and with as many different students as possible. I have created this program in Python and it works great (well, pretty good). For a variety of reasons, I am trying to port this over to C++ (which I do not know well at all) so I can hand it off to the boarding staff. Both student and staff (as well as table capacities) are read from text files. I have created two custom classes, one for students and one for tables, to handle the data. Here are the two class header files:

Table.h

#pragma once
#include <iostream>
#include "Student.h"
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

class Table
{
    // Private class variables
    string staff;
    int numSeats;
    vector<Student> seating;
public:
    Table(); // Default constructor
    Table(string s, int n);
    Table(const Table& that) : staff(that.staff), numSeats(that.numSeats)
    {
    }
    // Copy Constructor
    Table& operator=(const Table& that)
    {
        staff = that.staff;
        numSeats = that.numSeats;
        return *this;
    }
    int getNumSeats();
    string getStaffName();
    void addStudent(Student student);
    void removeStudent(Student student);
    void clearStudents();
    vector<Student> getTableSeating();
    int getRemainingSeats();
    ~Table(void);
};

Here is the student class file:

#pragma once
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

class Student
{
    string name;
    string country;
    vector<int> tablesSatAt;
public:
    Student(string n, string c);
    Student();
    Student(const Student& that) : name(that.name), country(that.country)
    {
    }
    Student& operator=(const Student& that)
    {
        name = that.name;
        country = that.country;
        return *this;
    }
    string getName();
    string getCountry();
    void addTable(int tableNumber);
    void removeTable(int tableNumber);
    bool satAtTable(int tableNumber);
    friend bool operator==(Student s1, Student s2);
    friend bool operator!=(Student s1, Student s2);
    ~Student(void);
};

bool operator==(Student s1, Student s2);
bool operator!=(Student s1, Student s2);

Here is the recursion function that does the heavy lifting:

bool seatRecursive(vector<Student> &tempStudents, vector<Table> &tempTables)
{
    if (tempStudents.size() == 0) return true; //base case

    Student nextStudent = randomSelect(tempStudents);
    for (vector<int>::size_type i=0; i<tempTables.size(); i++)
    {
        if (tempTables[i].getRemainingSeats() > 0 && !nextStudent.satAtTable(i))
        {
            addStudentToTable(nextStudent, tempTables, i);
            if (seatRecursive(tempStudents, tempTables)) return true;
            else 
            {
                removeStudentFromTable(nextStudent, tempTables, i);
                tempStudents.push_back(nextStudent);
            }
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Most of this works. When I run the program, I get a text file with 10 weeks of seating, but all the table seatings are the same. i.e. if I am a particular staff member, I have the same kids sitting at my table for all 10 weeks. I have a vector of ints that is supposed to be storing the table numbers that a student has sat at over time. When debugging, I notice that those table numbers are NOT being stored in that vector, it is always empty. My problem is that I can't figure out why this is happening. Is it because I am passing the vectors by reference? Does it have something to do with pointers, even though I am not explicitly declaring pointers?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated and I can paste in the rest of the code if necessary.

Brian

Answer 1

Why make it difficult?

Just put all your students in a vector, then use the STL random_shuffle algorithm, and finally just put the resulting vector of students linearly at all your available tables.

You don't even need custom classes for students or tables really