Question

I have two classes Teacher and Student. I am trying to get teacher to use the class functions in students. The problem I am having is that I need the number of student object being used in Teacher to be random. I thought I figured this out in the constructor, but I had to declare new student object in every function of teacher that I use student. So that just creates a new student object which does me no good. Here is my code

class Teacher
{
    private bool absence;
    private bool level;
    private static int uniqueID = 0;
    private ArrayList arrayList = new ArrayList();
    private ArrayList arrayList1 = new ArrayList();
    private int id = 0;
    private int numPages;
    private char present;
    Random random = new Random();
    int randomLevel = random.Next(20, 30);//this line does not work, if I could then I would just use randomLevel in the in the line below for creating my student objects
    Student student = new Student();
    int maybe;

    public Teacher()
    {
        int randomLevel = random.Next(1, 3);
        id = uniqueID;
        absence = false;
        level = (randomLevel % 2 == 0);
        uniqueID++;
        randomLevel = random.Next(20, 30);
        Student[] student = new Student[randomLevel];
        maybe = randomLevel;
        for (int i = 0; i < randomLevel; i++)
        {
            student[i] = new Student();
        }
    }

and here is a function in teacher that uses student

  public void addPages()//Come back need to add specific child
  {
        int choice = 0;
        Console.WriteLine("Enter the student ID");
        choice = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
        Student[] student= new Student[maybe];//If i get rid of this line then how will I choose which student object to use.  However this created a new student object and I do not want to do that

        student[choice] = new Student();
        int number = 0;
        if (student[choice].absent())
        {
            number = student[choice].excused();
        }
        else
        {

            Console.WriteLine("How many pages did the student read today? ");
            number = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
        }
        student[choice].add(number);           
   }

Is there a way to get the random to work in the declaration area above the constructor?

Answer 1

I think your problem comes down to variable scope but you have provided quite a bit of extraneous code. I’ll simplify down to what I think you actually care about.

class Teacher
{
    // class-level list of students
    private List<Student> _students = new List<Student>();

    public Teacher()
    {
        var random = new Random();
        var studentCount = random.Next(20,30);

        for(int i = 0; i < studentCount; i++)
        {
            _students.Add(new Student());
        }
    }

    // use _students from here on out
    public void AddPages(...) { ... }
}