My solution is slightly different, having difficulty with extra challenges

Hi guys,

I've been able to get both extra features to work. I started off with what David Bath said above about using a new conditional statement tree (by using the second 'if' statement) to check the length of the "message" variable after the "for" loop was finished running through the array of student records (thanks David, I had no idea we could have multiple conditional statement trees in a single loop, and it helped a lot).

Took some time and experimentation to get the multi-record printing to work, but as it turns out all you need to do is place the "message" variable into the function for building student records (instead of using a variable scope variable inside the function). If a student record is successfully found, the string gets added to the "message" variable; and this simply means that if more than one student record is found it all gets added to the "message" variable as a longer string.

Last thing, with the direct inclusion of the "message" variable in the record-building function, we have a string that is constantly being built upon each time we find a student record. This means that if we enter a student name that isn't there, the condition for alerting the user to a non-existent student (for example)

if(message.length == 0){.....}

will not work. To fix this, all I did was declare the "message" variable as an empty string at the beginning of the "while" loop so that the contents of the variable were cleared each time the loop ran.

Hope that helps, and you can find my code below.

David

// PREP

var message = '';
var student;
var search;

function getStudentReport(studentVariable){
      message += '<h2>Student: ' + student.name + '</h2>';
      message += "<ol>";
      message += '<li>Track: ' + student.track + '</li>';
      message += '<li>Points: ' + student.points + '</li>';
      message += '<li>Achievements: ' + student.achievements + "</li>";
      message += "</ol>";
      return message;
}

function print(message) {
  var outputDiv = document.getElementById('output');
  outputDiv.innerHTML = message;
}


// THE PROGRAM

while (true){
    message = "";
    search = prompt("Please enter a student name to see their records.");

    if (search == null || search.toLowerCase() == "quit"){
          break;
    }  

    else {for(var i = 0; i < students.length; i += 1){
                                student = students[i];

                                if(search.toLowerCase() == student.name.toLowerCase()){
                                getStudentReport(student);               
                                print(message);
                                }            
          }
    }

    if(message.length == 0){
        alert("We don't have that student in our system.");
    }
}


// THE EXECUTION

/* There is no need to execute our program by calling upon it, since the infinite loop above automatically starts running when read by the browser.*/

I think there are some problems with your logic. Let's talk about the getStudentDetails function. This function is looping through all the student records searching for a match. But if the first record doesn't match, then it goes into the else condition, which alerts that no student was found that matches. That's not what you want to do.

You should loop through all records, and then if no student was found that matches, then give an alert. So I'd suggest removing the else. Then after the loop is finished you can check for the length of the message string. If the length is 0 then no student was found and you can give an alert and then re-call the promptUser function. If the length is >0 then a student was found and you can call the print function there, with the message as the argument. Then you don't need to call the print function at the end of the file as you are doing.

This is kind of what I was thinking:

var message, search, student;

function getStudentReport(student) {
    var studentString = '';
    studentString += '<h2>Student: ' + student.name + '</h2>';
    studentString += "<ol>";
    studentString += '<li>Track: ' + student.track + '</li>';
    studentString += '<li>Points: ' + student.points + '</li>';
    studentString += '<li>Achievements: ' + student.achievements + "</li>";
    studentString += "</ol>";
    return studentString;
}

function print(message) {
    var outputDiv = document.getElementById('output');
    outputDiv.innerHTML = message;
}


// THE PROGRAM

while (true) {
    message = "";
    search = prompt("Please enter a student name to see their records.");

    if (search == null || search.toLowerCase() == "quit"){
          break;
    }  

    else {
        for(var i = 0; i < students.length; i += 1){
            student = students[i];

            if (search.toLowerCase() == student.name.toLowerCase()){
                message += getStudentReport(student);               
            }            
        }

        if (message.length == 0) {
            alert("We don't have that student in our system.");
        } else {
            print(message);
        }
    }
}

I haven't tested this, but I think it will work...

Hi David,

Thanks for the comments and the tweeks. I forgot to take the "studentVariable" parameter out when I wrote the code for the final feature, but thankfully it didn't make any difference (but still good to catch that leftover and take it out for efficiency's sake).