Software Engineering Workshops
Designing and Building a Financial trading Engine

- Semester 1 - 2012 -

Programming task 1

Write a program to read a sample of orders in Sirca’s format (see Tutorial). The program reads a configuration file called “SystemVars.txt” and generates a file called “status.txt”.

The SystemVars.txt file is organized as a CSV file and each line contains an attribute value pair separated by a comma. The following attributes are specified (in any order):

1- input_file: name of the input file that contains the CSV data to process.

2- input_file_dir: path where the input_file is located.

3- output_file_dir: the destination directory for the result files.

input_file, SampleOrders

input_file_dir,C:\SENG3020\testfiles\

output_file_dir,C:\temp\

The status.txt file specifies the final state of program. If the program runs successfully then the file contains 2 lines:

• OK
  (a flag to indicate success).
• <filename>
  name and path of the output file generated by program.

If failure then the status.txt should have 2 lines:

• ERR: flag to indicate a failure
• message: text to explain the failure.

In this activity, the program should simply check that each line in the orders file is properly formatted and should return the name of the input file in the status file (2^nd line). If there is an error in any of orders, it should stop and return an error message. The program should work regardless of the order of the attributes. Such order is specified in the first line.

You can test your program initially with the sample of orders