Assignment #1: Tech Jobs (Console Edition)

Introduction

Congratulations! Based on your hard work and strong coding skills, you have been brought on as an apprentice to the LaunchCode Tech Team. You will be paired with a mentor to help you get comfortable and continue learning.

The Company Team at LaunchCode works with employer partners to match qualified programmers with apprenticeships. They asked for a new tool to be built to help them easily manage data for currently available jobs. Over the next few weeks, you will help them build this application alongside mentors from the Tech Team.

This first project will be a simple proof-of-concept prototype. It won’t be pretty or have lots of features, but it will give you a chance to work through some initial concepts and get feedback from LaunchCode staff.

Your mentor on this project is Blake.

Learning Objectives

In this project, you will show that you can:

1. Read and understand code written by others.

2. Use core Java syntax (methods, variables, loops, conditionals).

3. Utilize ArrayList and HashMap collection types.

4. Work with console I/O via the Scanner class.

5. Work with data types and arrays.

TechJobs (Console Edition)

The app you must help design is a simple console (i.e. command-line) prototype of the new TechJobs app. It will allow LaunchCode staff to browse and search listings of open jobs by employer partners.

The prototype process gives everybody a chance to work out some initial ideas without investing a ton of time into developing a finished product. Once everybody likes the prototype, the Tech Team will begin work toward a full-fledged application.

Your Assignment

Blake created a console application and started to fill in some features. His code allows users to search job listings by one of several fields. It can also display lists of all of the values of a given field in the system (e.g. all employers, or all locations).

Blake has now handed the task off to you. You must add a couple of features and then get feedback from the Company Team.

After you work through the tasks Blake has laid out for you, tackle one or more of the bonus missions.

Getting Started

In Canvas, Graded Assignment #1: TechJobs Console contains a GitHub Classroom assignment invitation link and then set up the project in IntelliJ. Refer back to the GitHub Classroom instructions from Assignment #0: Hello, World! for details.

Before diving in and starting to code, make sure you understand what the code you’ve been given does. Since you’re starting with a functioning—albeit unfinished—program, go ahead and run it to get an idea of how it works. To do this, right-click on the main method in the TechJobs class and select Run TechJobs.main().

Warning

The application will run until you force it to quit, re-prompting time after time. To kill it, press the red “stop” icon in the Run pane or entereing x from the initial prompt. We’ll learn precisely how the program manages to work this way below.

Let’s explore the code by starting with the source of the data our program is providing access to.

The Data File: jobs_data.csv

Our simple app doesn’t connect to a database. If the prototype proves useful and we continue development, we’ll add that functionality later. But for now, we’ve been given a CSV (comma-separated values) file from the Company Team at LaunchCode that contains some recent jobs. This file was exported from an Excel spreadsheet into this format, which is easy for programs to read in.

If CSV files are new to you, don’t worry, they’re easy to understand. CSV files are conceptually similar to simple spreadsheets in that they organize data in rows and columns. The major difference is that they don’t have the ability to carry out calculations the way spreadsheets do, and you can easily open, read, and edit them in plain text editors.

Open up jobs_data.csv, which is in the src/main/java/resources folder. You’ll see that the first line is:

name,employer,location,position type,core competency

While it isn’t required, the first line of a CSV file often represents the column names. We have 5 names here, which indicates that each of our rows in the CSV file should have 5 fields. In this file format, a “row” corresponds to a new line. So each line below the first will constitute a row of data, or a record.

Have a look at the data below line 1, and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Which fields match up with which column names above?

2. Why do some lines/rows (e.g. line 10) have more commas than others, if commas are supposed to separate columns?

3. What role do the double-quotes play?

The TechJobs Class

The TechJobs class contains the main method that will drive our program’s functionality. It contains three methods:

1. main - The main application runner.

2. getUserSelection - A utility method that displays a menu of choices and returns the user’s selection.

3. printJobs - This is meant to print a list of jobs to the console in a nicely formatted manner, but hasn’t been implemented yet. This will be part of your job.

Let’s look at each of these.

The main Method

The logic within main presents menus in turn, and based on the user’s choice, takes appropriate action.

It begins by declaring two local variables: columnChoices and actionChoices. These contain information relating to the menus that we’ll display, and we’ll look at them in more detail later.

Next, we notice a while loop that starts while (true). While we usually want to avoid creating infinite loops, we have a good reason for doing so in this case! We want our application to continually run until the user decides they want to quit. The simplest way to do this is to loop forever. When the user wants to quit, they can enter x at the initial View jobs by prompt. As you saw above, however, IntelliJ’s Run pane works slightly differently and you’ll need to rely on the red “stop” icon to stop the program.

Note

Another way to kill a running program from the terminal is by pressing ctrl-C (a widely-known command to kill a console application). This will work in any terminal context, and not just for our console program in IntelliJ

The main method can be summarized as follows:

1. Present the user with choices on how to view data: list or search.

2. Based on that choice, prompt them for the column to apply the choice to. In the case of a search, we also ask for a search term.

3. Carry out the request to the JobData class via one of its public methods.

4. Display the results of the request.

5. Repeat.

main simulates a query to an external source:

1. We ask the method for data that originates from a non-Java source.

2. The method parses and filters that data.

3. The method presents the data in a useful manner.

The getUserSelection Method

The getUserSelection method takes in a String to display above the menu, to provide context for what they are being asked. It also takes in a HashMap with String keys and String values. How is this used? What will this HashMap contain when the method runs?

To figure this out, right-click on the method name and select Find Usages. This will open a pane and display each location in the program where getUserSelection is called. The first such usage is the first line of the main while loop:

String actionChoice = getUserSelection("View jobs by:", actionChoices);

What is this HashMap named actionChoices? If we look a few lines above, we see:

// Top-level menu options
HashMap<String, String> actionChoices = new HashMap<>();
actionChoices.put("search", "Search");
actionChoices.put("list", "List");

If you recall how the program worked when you ran it, the first menu that you chose had two options, Search and List, which seem to correspond to the entries in actionChoices. This is, in fact, the case. This is the data that is used to generate the first menu we see when running the program.

The second usage of getUserSelection is a few lines below:

String columnChoice = getUserSelection("List", columnChoices);

This references columnChoices, which is declared at the top of main and has a similar structure to actionChoices (they’re the same data type and are used in calls to the same method, so this shouldn’t be surprising). Most of the entries in columnChoices correspond to columns in the jobs data set, but there’s one additional entry with key/value pair "all"/"All". These entries will help us present to the user the options for searching our data, which will correspond to searching within a given column, or searching all columns at once.

The keys in actionChoices and columnChoices represent the “internal” String we’ll use to refer to these options (e.g. when representing the user’s menu choice, or querying data). The values in the map represent the “external” way that these are represented to the user.

Within getUserSelection itself, most of the code is within a do-while loop. A do-while loop is similar to a while loop, but the conditional check is at the end of the loop’s code block. This has the net consequence that the loop’s code block always runs at least once. At the end of the block’s execution, we check a condition to determine if we should run the block again. This nicely mimics the behavior of simple menu-driven applications.

Within this loop, menu options are printed to the screen, and user input is collected. If the input is valid, it returns the choice as a String to the caller. This String corresponds to the chosen key (from choices, which will be either actionChoices or columnChoices) of the item the user selected. If invalid, it re-prompts the user.

The local variable choiceKeys is used to easily enumerate the choices HashMap. In other words, it gives us a simple way to provide an ordering to choices, which doesn’t have an ordering of its own.

The JobData Class

The JobData class is responsible for importing the data from the CSV file and parsing it into a Java-friendly format, that is, into HashMap and ArrayList form. Look toward the bottom of the class and you will see a method named loadData, which does just what it advertises. After parsing the file data, it stores the data in the private property allJobs which is of type ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>.

Note

We haven’t covered static properties and methods in-depth yet. For this assignment, know simply that they allow us to use properties and methods of a class without creating an object from that class. For example, we can call JobData.findAll() from the TechJob class.

If you want to create a new method in JobData, or add a property, be sure to declare it as static.

Let’s look more closely at the data type of allJobs. It purports to be an ArrayList that stores HashMap objects which have String keys and String values. If we were to represent some of this data visually, using [] for an ArrayList and {} with key/value pairs, it would look like this:

[
    {
        "name": "Junior Data Analyst",
        "employer": "Lockerdome",
        "location": "Saint Louis",
        "position type": "Data Scientist / Business Intelligence",
        "core competency": "Statistical Analysis"
    },
    {
        "name": "Junior Web Developer",
        "employer": "Cozy",
        "location": "Portland",
        "position type": "Web - Back End",
        "core competency": "Ruby"
    },
    ...
]

If you look at the loadData method you’ll see a lot of unfamiliar code. Blake wrote this essential piece of code for you, and while you won’t have to modify it, it will be useful to have an idea of how it works. Read through the code until you feel like you can describe its functionality at a basic level.

There are three more methods in JobData, each of which is public (and static, per our earlier note): findAll(), findAll(String), and findByColumnAndValue(String, String). Note that there are two methods named findAll, but this is allowed in Java via a feature called overloading. Overloading happens when multiple methods have the same name, but they each have different input parameters (also called argument lists). Read more about overloading.

Here are some questions to ask yourself while reading this code:

1. What is the data type of a “job” record?

2. Why does findAll(String) return something of type ArrayList<String> while findByColumnAndValue(String, String) and findAll() return something of type ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>?

3. Why is loadData() called at the top of each of these four methods? Does this mean that we load the data from the CSV file each time one of them is called?

Your Tasks

Before diving into your tasks, review Assignment #0: Hello, World! for details on running the autograding tests for this assignment. This assignment has multiple tests, and we highly recommend the following workflow:

1. Write the code for the task, verifying manually that it works by running the TechJobs.main method.

2. When you think you’ve completed a task, run the individual test that corresponds to the task.

3. If the test fails, review the test output and go back to your code to try to fix it.

4. Once the single test passes, run all of the tests to make sure you didn’t break any tests that previously passed.

5. Repeat this process until all tests pass.

Warning

You may see an error in the test file on line 38.

This can easily be fixed by clicking on IntelliJ’s red light-bulb menu next to the error and choosing the first option.

Now we’ll outline the tasks for your first apprenticeship assignment.

Implement printJobs

When trying out the program, and later when reading the code, you hopefully noticed that there’s some work to do in the printJobs method. As it stands, it currently just prints a message: "printJobs is not implemented yet".

Complete this method. It should print out jobs in this precise format:

*****
position type: Data Scientist / Business Intelligence
name: Sr. IT Analyst (Data/BI)
employer: Bull Moose Industries
location: Saint Louis
core competency: Statistical Analysis
*****

*****
position type: Web - Back End
name: Ruby specialist
employer: LaunchCode
location: Saint Louis
core competency: Javascript
*****

For the autograding script to correctly grade your code, you’ll need to match this format exactly. In particular, note the number of asterisks surrounding each listing, and the blank line between listings.

If there are no results, it should print No Results. Again, you should use this exact message.

Tip

To do this, you’ll need to iterate over an ArrayList of jobs. Each job is itself a HashMap. While you can get each of the items out of the HashMap using the known keys (employer, location, etc.), think instead about creating a nested loop to loop over each HashMap. If a new field is added to the job records, this approach will print out the new field without any updates to printJobs.

Test this method before moving on to your next step:

1. Save your changes.

2. Select Run from the Run menu and choose to run the TechJobs class (or if you have recently run it, just select the green arrow in the top right corner of the screen).

3. Select “1” to list the jobs, and then “0” to list them all.

4. Make sure the printout matches the styling above.

5. Test that it prints a descriptive message if no jobs are found by selecting “0” to search and then “3” to search for a location. Then enter a location that is not in the data (e.g. “Cancun”). Your message should be displayed.

Create Method findByValue

At this stage, the application will allow users to search a given column of the data for a given String. Your next task is to enable a search that looks for the search term in all of the columns.

In the JobData class, find the method findByValue. This method has been outlined for you but contains none of the code needed to work (you should leave the loadData() call as the first line of the method, however). Here are a few observations:

1. The code that you write should not contain duplicate jobs. So, for example, if a listing has position type “Web - Front End” and name “Front end web dev” then searching for “web” should not include the listing twice.

2. As with printJobs, you should write your code in a way that if a new column is added to the data, your code will automatically search the new column as well.

3. You should NOT write code that calls findByColumnAndValue once for each column. Rather, utilize loops and collection methods as you did above.

4. You should, on the other hand, read and understand findByColumnAndValue, since your code will look similar in some ways.

You’ll need to call findByValue from somewhere in main. We’ll leave it up to you to find where. You might have noticed that when you try to search all columns using the app, a message is printed, so that is a good clue to help you find where to place this new method call. Once you find where to call your new method, you can Run the program again to test your code.

Make Search Methods Case-Insensitive

You’ve completed your first two tasks!

Let’s assume you demonstrated the updated application for the Company Team, and they noticed a feature that could be improved. When searching for jobs with the skill JavaScript some results were missing (e.g. the Watchtower Security job on line 31 of the CSV file). The search methods turn out to be case-sensitive, so they treat JavaScript and Javascript as different strings.

The Company Team strongly requested that this needs to be fixed, and of course you told them that you are up to the task.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you get started:

1. Which methods are called when searching?

2. How is the user’s search string compared against the values of fields of the job HashMap objects?

3. How can you make this comparison in a way that effectively ignores the case of the strings?

4. How can you do this without altering the capitalization of the items in allJobs so that the data gets printed out the same way that it appears in job_data.csv?

You might find it useful to review the String methods listed in the chapter on Data Types.

When this task is completed, you’re done!

Sanity Check

Before submitting, make sure that your application:

1. Prints each field of a job when using search functionality, and when listing all columns. If there are no search results, a descriptive message is displayed.

2. Allows the user to search for a string across all columns.

3. Returns case-insensitive results.

Solution Demo

Watch a demo of a working solution.

How to Submit

To turn in your assignment and get credit, follow the submission instructions.

Bonus Missions

If you want to take your learning a few steps further, here are some additional problems you can try to solve. We’re not providing you much guidance here, but we have confidence that you can figure these problems out!

1. Sorting list results: When a user asks for a list of employers, locations, position types, etc., it would be nice if results were sorted alphabetically. Make this happen.

2. Returning a copy of allJobs: Look at JobData.findAll(). Notice that it’s returning the allJobs property, which is a static property of the JobData class. In general, this is not a great thing to do, since the person calling our findAll method could then mess with the data that allJobs contains. Fix this by creating a copy of allJobs. Hint: Look at the constructors in the Oracle ArrayList documentation.