Final Project for CSCI 2270: Data Structures
To-Do List for Managing Tasks Sorted by Urgency
Data Structures Used:
For my final project, I created a to-list manager where tasks are sorted by urgency. The main data structure that I used was a Binary Search Tree. In the tree, the to-do nodes are sorted by their urgency. So, the rightmost node is the most urgent task at any given time. I used this data structure because it has the organization structure that I need for sorting elements and it also has search time complexity of O(log(n)). I could have used a priority queue for my main data structure, but searching through a priority queue has a time complexity of O(n). The search complexity mattered to me because I wanted the user to be able to quickly find tasks that were not necessarily the most urgent. This uses less time when a user wants a random task or needs to delete or edit a task that is not the most urgent. I also used stacks for the traversal of my tree in a number of functions, like random and printing to the file.
Challenges and Application:
A challenge of my project was finding a random to-do item. I ended up solving it by generating a random number between 1 and the number of nodes minus one. Then, I visit that number of nodes and return that node. I will be using this project to keep track of my personal to-do tasks, but it could have a business application where a manager could assign project tasks of varying urgencies to employees.
References:
I thought it would be a neat feature to add the time at which each to-do task was created by the user. We had not learned this is in class so I researched online and utilize a piece of code from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16358224. This allowed me to include when exactly the to-do was created, so a user can notice if they made their to-do a long time ago.
Methodology and Design:
