Problem passing an array of structs

[joeSquid]

I am trying to write a C program that makes use of an array of structs, but I am having a problem passing the array as a parameter. The struct is an employee, defined in a header file as:

   typedef struct {
           char name[32];
           int  employeeID;
   } employee;

My main program creates an array of the employees, with the line:

    employee employeeTable[MAX_EMPLOYEES];

I am trying to call my displayTable function like so:

   displayTable(employeeTable);

The displayTable function is given below:

   void displayTable(const employee *empTable){
        int i;
        int key;
        for(i=0;i<MAX_EMPLOYEES;i++){
           key = empTable[i].employeeID;
           if(key == -1){
              printf("Location #: %d\tEmpty\n",i);
           }else if(key == -2){
              printf("Location #: %d\tPreviously Deleted\n",i);
           }else{
              printf("Location #: %d\t%d\t%s\n",i,key,empTable[i].name);
           }
        }
   }

The compiler is claiming incompatible types. I searched the net, trying to find an example of how to do this correctly. All of the examples I saw omitted the typedef command, and then added the word struct to the parameter of the function. I believe that using the typedef statement allows me to omit this, but I am not able to compile. Any suggestions?

[Ganon11]

Instead of using const employee* empTable in the function header, try const employee empTable[]? If that doesn't work, I dunno.

[joeSquid]

no such luck...any other suggestions?

[weaknessforcats]

no such luck...any other suggestions?

What compiler are you using??

Your code in your original post compiles and links without error using Visual Studio.NET 2005.

[joeSquid]

gcc...i'm using bloodshed for the coding

[Banfa]

The code looks good to me too, you may want to post the exact errors you are getting, it may help us.

[joeSquid]

All right; I solved it. The call to the displayTable function appeared before the actual declaration of the function. Apparently the compiler was making some assumption about the code, and was preventing it from compiling. I added the line:

void displayTable(co nst employee*);

before (and outside of) main, and now it compiles without problem. Anybody know exactly what was going on? And thanks for letting me know that it compiled okay; I wouldn't have thought to try that otherwise.

[drhowarddrfine]

You got that error because the function wasn't defined before use. gcc will report it, in certain instances, as incompatible type when it's really looking for a definition, which you eventually provided.

[RRick]

In C, if you call a function before you declare it, the compiler assumes it has the form

int calledFunc();

When you define the function later, the compiler compares that new declaration to the one it created before. In your case, the compiler probably didn't like the fact that your function didn't return an int that it was expecting.

[joeSquid]

Thanks for the help...coming from c++, I normally make a habit of placing my function definitions in a header file before I write my program. When I started learning c, I began getting in the habit of declaring my functions right before main (not sure why I started doing it this way). I forgot to do even that with this program; my first few functions all returned ints; thus gave me no similar errors. I see why now. Thanks for the insight!