More on Glossary exercises

Aim

To continue with the Glossary exercises and practicing reading API documentation.

More Glossary exercises

• g). Implement the method addWord within the Lexicon class. This method receives a string as parameter and adds this string as one more word in the WordList ArrayList field of the Lexicon class. This method returns a boolean value; true if the word did not previously exist and could be added and false otherwise. Test the method by adding a new word and verifying that the word is added to WordList and by trying to add a word that already exists and checking that the method returns false and the duplicated word is not added.
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  • In this case the solution is a bit different from the starting program of the next exercise. This is a solution program
• h). So far the exercises have referred mainly to the Lexicon class, from this point they will be mostly about the Glossary class. This exercise is about linking the two. Glossary should support the search for terms of a Java glossary and therefore should have a lexicon field (Glossary is responsible for handling phrases, Lexicon for handling individual words). Using the starting program provided, declare and initialise an object of type lexicon as a field of Glossary. Test your modification by creating an object of type Glossary and verifying that it contains a lexicon field (although for the time being it will be empty).
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• i). Update the lexicon field every time a new term is added. Every time a term is added to the glossary (through the addTerm method), everyone of its words should be added to the lexicon. In order to implement this functionality the Glossary class has to be modified in two ways: implementing the method addTermToLexicon and invoking it from the addTerm method. The method addTermToLexicon is of type void and receives only one parameter, a string that represents the phrase whose words will be added to the lexicon. Note that one phrase can generate several lexicon words (for example, if the parameter is the string `out of bounds exception', it will generate four words). Each word can be added to the lexicon using the addWord method in the Lexicon class. Once these modifications have been made test them by creating and new glossary object and verifying that the words of its terms have been added to the lexicon field.
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• j) Implement the method includeWords within the Glossary class. This method receives two arrayLists, one containing phrases and the other containing words and returns a list of phrases (another ArrayList of Strings). These are similar to the parameter phrases but modified after the inclusion of the words. Each word should be included at the end of each partially parameter phrase. Therefore, if the parameters have n words and m phrases, the method should return a list of n x m phrases. For example, if the list of partially formed phrases contains:

  out of bounds out of boolean out of public out of super out of field

  and the list of alternative words is:

  exception deprecation encapsulation constructor oriented

  this method would return the ArrayList of strings:

  out of bounds exception out of bounds deprecation out of bounds encapsulation out of bounds constructor out of bounds oriented out of boolean exception out of boolean deprecation out of boolean encapsulation out of boolean constructor out of boolean oriented out of public exception out of public deprecation out of public encapsulation out of public constructor out of public oriented out of super exception out of super deprecation out of super encapsulation out of super constructor out of super oriented out of field exception out of field deprecation out of field encapsulation out of field constructor out of field oriented

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• k) Implement the method getSimilarPhrases within the Glossary class. This method receives a phrase to search in the glossary (a String) and returns a list of phrases (an ArrayList of Strings) built from words from the lexicon and similar to the parameter string. For each word in the parameter string, if the word is in the lexicon the word itself should be added to the end of every item in the list of alternative phrases, otherwise, the lexicon class should provide a list of similar words (by invoking the getSimilarWords method, the number of similar words could be an arbitrary number declared as a constant). Each word in this list of similar words should be progressively added to a list of alternative phrases, invoking the method includeWords, in each step. Note that the first time that the includeWords method is invoked, the list of alternative phrases should be initialised to contain the empty string only, this is what kick-starts the process.
• This is the last exercise about the glossary, it's starting program is basically the same as the starting program for the Glossary assignment (the only difference is that the starting program for the assignment contains a simple user interaction method).

Last updated at 7:39pm, Wednesday November 9th 2011 Dr Natalia Beloff (N.Beloff@sussex.ac.uk)