Question

I’m kind of stumped here.

I’m relatively new to Java/Programming in general. I want to make a program that “books seats” in a 4×4 grid. This multidimensional array will be of the type boolean so that if the seat is not taken, it returns false, but if it is taken it will return true. I want to be able to specify different seats, so like the first two rows will be a different section than the last two rows. Right now I have a method but it just books the entire first two rows as soon as I call that method (as it should, logically speaking). But I want to only be able to book one seat at a time, so that it will end that for loop as soon as one seat is booked. If I select that I want to book another seat, it will move to the next available seat in those rows or columns.

Here is the code so far:

import javax.swing.JOptionPane;

public class Seats{
int maxRows = 4;
int maxCols = 4;
boolean seating[][] = new boolean[maxRows][maxCols];

String bookSeat = null;

public static void main(String []args){
    Seats seats = new Seats();
    seats.start();

}

public void start(){
    bookSeat = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "Book a seat? (y/n)");
    if(bookSeat.equals("y")){
        bookSeat();
    }else{
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Okay.");       
    }
    displaySeats(seating);
}

private boolean bookSeat(){
    boolean isBooked = false;
    for(int row = 0; row <2; row++){
        for(int col = 0;col<maxCols;col++){
            if (seating[row][col] == false){
                seating[row][col] = true;
                isBooked = true;
            }
        }
    }
    return isBooked;

}

private void displaySeats(boolean[][] anArray){

    String seatTaken;
    int r=0;
    int c=0;
    for(int display=0; display<1; display++){
        for(r=0;r<anArray.length;r++){
            for(c=0;c<anArray.length;c++){
                if (seating[r][c]==false){
                    seatTaken = "O";
                }
                else{
                    seatTaken = "X";
                }
            System.out.print("\t[" + seatTaken + "] \t");

            }
            System.out.println("");

        }
    }       
  }
}

Answer 1

private boolean bookSeat(){
    boolean isBooked = false;
    for(int row = 0; row <2; row++){
        for(int col = 0;col<maxCols;col++){
            if (seating[row][col] == false){
                seating[row][col] = true;
                return true;
            }
        }
    }
    return false;
}

I think what you’re looking to do is return once you find an open seat and book it — as shown in the method above. This way the loops won’t continue once you book a seat.