Question

I have a class with fields like firstname, age, school etc. I need to be able to store other information like for instance, where they have travelled, and what year it was in. I cannot declare another class specifically to hold travelDestination and what year, so I think a struct might be best. This is just an example:

struct travel {
    string travelDest;
    string year;
};

The issue is people are likely to have travelled different amounts. I was thinking of just having an array of travel structs to hold the data. But how do I create a fixed sized array to hold them, without knowing how big I need it to be?

Perhaps I am going about this the completely wrong way, so any suggestions as to a better way would be appreciated.

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I realise there is essentially no difference between a class and struct, but for the purposes of assignment criteria I am not allowed a “class”, so yeah.

Answer 1

You could try associating a std::vector with each person, with each entry in the vector containing a struct:

typedef struct travel {
    string travelDest;
    string year;
} travelRecord;

std::vector<travelRecord> travelInfo;

You can then add items to the vector as you see fit:

travelRecord newRecord1 = {"Jamaica", "2010"};
travelInfo.push_back(newRecord1);

travelRecord newRecord2 = {"New York", "2011"};
travelInfo.push_back(newRecord2);

Some more information about vector operations can be found here.