2. Instruction

For this assignment, your goal is to create a Car Purchase Advisor System that utilises files "stock.txt"  and “order.txt”  located  in  the  "data" folder. The application will feature a text interface to act as the advisor system for a car retailer. The functionalities include:

Functionality 1:

When  the  program  starts,  test  data  needs  to  be  automatically  generated.  The generated test data needs to be reflected in the “stock.txt” file and also loaded in the program  memory.  For  the  format  of  the  test  data,  you  can  refer  to  the  provided example “stock.txt”.  Please  ensure  that  the test  data  presents a certain degree of randomness.

Functionality 2:

After generating the test  data,  a  menu  should  be  presented to the  user  with the following options:

a)   Look for the nearest car retailer

b)   Get car purchase advice

c)   Place a car order

d)   Exit

Functionality 3:

If  the  user  selects  the  option  for  checking  the  nearest  car  retailer,  the  program should  ask  for  the   user ’s  postcode  to  identify  the   nearest  car  retailer  (here  we assume that suburbs with smaller differences in postcodes are geographically closer, for more information please refer to section 2.3.6).

Functionality 4:

If the user selects the option for getting car purchase advice, the program needs to:

a)   First  list  all  the available car  retailers and  prompt the users to select one to continue the advising process;

b)   Then show a sub-menu with the following options:

i)       Recommend a car

ii)       Get all cars in stock

iii)       Get  cars  in stock  by car types  (the car types is a list of strings, e.g., [“AWD”, “RWD”])

iv)       Get probationary licence permitted cars in stock

c)   The option i) should randomly select one car from the current stock of the car retailer, the options ii) to iv) should show the current stock of a car retailer. You need to first print the retailer ID and the retailer name, and also ensure that the printed stocked cars are well-formatted.

Functionality 5:

If the user selects the option for placing a car order, the program should ask for the retailer  ID  and  the  car   ID  from  the  user  separated  by  a  space.  However,  before placing the order, the program needs to check whether the current time is within the business  hours  of  the target  retailer.  If  not, an order should  not  be created and a message should be prompted to the user. For any other invalid cases, you need to handle them  properly.  Otherwise,  in  valid  cases,  an  order  should  be  created  and stored in “order.txt” and the order details should be printed to the user.

Please  note  that  the program will continue to run until  the  user  chooses  to  exit  the application.

To develop this application, you will need to create four classes, each defined in a separate Python file (i.e. *.py), and one main Python file to execute the program. All the required files can be found in the RENAME_ME.zip file, which is located in the Assessments section on Moodle. It is important to note that the addition of supplementary classes exceeding the prescribed four may incur a penalty in the form of mark deduction.

2.1. Car Class