cpp-university-management

A text-based university simulation in C++ — you play as the department secretary. Hire professors, enrol students, create semesters and courses, assign teaching, run exams, advance to the next season, and check who can graduate. Built as a single CLI "game" loop with full referential integrity across the domain model.

University class project for the Object-Oriented Programming course at the University of Athens (Department of Informatics & Telecommunications). Solo project.

What it does

main constructs a Life object, which owns a Secretary, which owns all the people and academic structure. Life::service_player_commands() is the REPL: read a line, dispatch.

                     ┌─────────────────────────┐
                     │           Life          │
                     │ (REPL + current season) │
                     └────────────┬────────────┘
                                  │ owns
                                  ▼
                     ┌─────────────────────────┐
                     │        Secretary        │
                     │  students     professors│
                     │  courses      semesters │
                     │  graduates              │
                     │  mandatory/optional sums│
                     └────────────┬────────────┘
                                  │ holds
                  ┌───────────────┼────────────────┐
                  ▼               ▼                ▼
            ┌─────────┐     ┌──────────┐     ┌────────────┐
            │ Student │     │Professor │     │  Semester  │
            └────┬────┘     └────┬─────┘     └─────┬──────┘
                 │ enrolled in   │ assigned to     │ contains
                 └───────┬───────┴───────┬─────────┘
                         ▼               ▼
                       ┌─────────────────┐
                       │     Course      │
                       │  mandatory/opt  │
                       │  points         │
                       └─────────────────┘

Sample command flow:

Enter a command: create student
Enter a command: create professor
Enter a command: create course
Enter a command: create semester
Enter a command: register …      # tie student → course
Enter a command: assign …        # tie professor → course
Enter a command: end season      # exams run, grades recorded
Enter a command: next season     # season flips (spring ⇄ winter)
Enter a command: print can graduate

Graduation rule: pass all mandatory courses and collect ≥ 30% of total optional-course points.

What was interesting

• Relationship integrity on every update. Changing one entity ripples to every related entity. If a course's semester is moved later, every enrolled student whose academic year no longer permits that course is automatically un-registered. Same for deletions — entities are cleanly detached from everything that referenced them, no dangling pointers.
• Secretary as the only mutable god-object, by design. The OOP-class spec asked for explicit secretary-mediated operations rather than entities mutating each other directly. Everything funnels through Secretary methods like addCourseToSemester, assignProffessorToCourse, registerInCourse — easier to enforce invariants in one place than scattered.
• Two-pass exam logic. doTheExams(Season) walks the season's courses, and the doTheExams_helper per-course pass writes grades and updates the per-student / per-course passed/failed tallies that printStatistics and canGraduate later read in O(1).
• Life and Secretary cross-friended. friend class Life; in Secretary lets the REPL layer reach private state during seasonal transitions without exposing those internals to every caller.

Build & run

make
./build/my_program

Then type help for the command list. import <file> loads bulk data — see test_files/ for the expected format (students.txt, professors1.txt, courses1.txt, semesters1.txt).

Modules

File	Purpose
main.cpp	Constructs Life, starts the REPL
src/Life.cpp	Command dispatch, season transitions, ANSI-coloured I/O
src/Secretary.cpp	Domain logic: create/update/delete + relationship maintenance + exams + statistics
src/Student.cpp / src/Professor.cpp / src/Person.cpp	Person hierarchy
src/Course.cpp / src/Semester.cpp	Academic structure
src/Gender.cpp	Enum-with-string-conversion helpers
includes/*.hpp	Public interfaces, plus ErrorSignals.hpp for thrown-value codes
documentary/assignment_instructions.pdf	Original assignment specification (Greek)

License

MIT — applies to my own code in this repo. Assignment-distributed materials retain their original course copyright.