Hi,
in my company we are using IBM's clearcase tool for configuration management. On our linux machines we use up to now KDE3 with this nice plugin for Konqueror which allows access to the clearcase own file system MVFS. Now we need to update our linux machines to KDE4 and the plugin does not work any more.
I tried to find some documentation/tutorials how to write plugins for Dolphin but I did not find more than the simple "kio_hello" which works, but only in Konqueror, not in Dolphin.
Can anybody guide me through the work? I have some experience in writing KDE4 application but no idea how to write plugins or kio_slaves.

Regrads,
ChrisF

Please see https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tu ... ello_World for a tutorial on KIOSlaves in KDE 4. The API shouldn't have changed much - for the most part it will probably be adapting class names, macros and the build system I suspect.

If you're interested in maintaining this over the long term, you may wish to get in contact with other KDE developers on kde-devel@kde.org so this can be upstreamed and included within KDE.

Hi,
over the last weekend I did a deep dive into ForwardingSlaveBase(), which is used in the KDE3 version of KlearCase to get the clearcase-releated file version information extracted from the data base and be displayed in konqueror's file window. These extra data is shown in additional columns of Konquerors detailed file view and they are defined in the *.protocol file with the items "listing", "ExtraNames" and "ExtraTypes".
As far as I find out up to now, the Dolphin file browser does not support such extra information to be displayed in the window. I checked other KIO slaves that uses extra file informations (e.g the trash:/ protocol for "Original Path" and "Deletion Date") but they are also not visible in the Dolphin's file browser!?
Is there any posibility to add these additional columns to the Dolphin's file window? Without this feature, the Clearcase kio slave does not make sense...

Regards,
ChrisF

I'll move this topic to the Dolphin forum so the Dolphin developers can respond to this.

Thanks for your efforts to port the kioslave!

I was not involved in KDE yet in the KDE 3 times, so I don't really know how showing custom data columns that are defined by the kioslave worked. All I can say is that Dolphin does not support this feature, and that I don't see anything in the KFileItem class [1], which KDirLister uses to tell Dolphin and other applications about the items that the kioslave found, that could be used for something like that. In principle, the "extraData" function looks like it could be used for that, but this function is deprecated and has already been removed in KF5, so using it is not an option.

So even if we wanted to support this feature in Dolphin, I do not see at all how it could be done with the KDE 4.x and KF5 versions of KDirLister

[1] http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-apid ... eItem.html

Hi again,
after I realized that Dolphin can not display additional file infomation I focused my work on the context menu which is needed to perform the ClearCase actions (like checkout/checkin) on selected files. In the KDE version 4.13 there is a class KFileItemActionPlugin to enhance Dolphin's file context menu.
But I need the ClearCase support for KDE 4.3 (CentOS/RHEL 6) which does not provides this class. Is it possible to enhance Dolphin's file context menu with an additional plugin?
I already know the way to extend Dolphin's menu with actions defined in a *.desktop-file, but these actions are available for all files all the time, independent to the ClearCase status of the file (e.g. if the file is already checked-out it makes no more sense to show the action "checkout"). For such a "selective" action popup, I guess, I need a plugin which evaluates the ClearCase status of the selected file (via the kio_slave) first and after that providing the possible actions only.
Is there any chance to realize this functionality within the "old" Dolphin version 1.3 (KDE 4.3)?

Thanks for your help,
ChrisF

Unfortunately, KAbstractFileItemActionPlugin (and the very similar, but deprecated KFileItemActionPlugin) is only available in KDE SC 4.6 and later. I'm afraid that the ".desktop file"/Service Menu mechanism, which is much less flexible, is the only way to extend the context menu in earlier versions.

Hi again,
after a long break with vacation, business travel and other stuff, I'm back on the project!
Meanwhile I found a way how to port/re-implement the ClearCase stuff for KDE version 4.10. I create a small kio-slave and a dolphin file action plugin and both work quite well.
Currently I looking for the way to trigger a reload of the current directory shown in Dolphin after the user has modified the status of file via the plugin (check-in or check-out). Is this possible?

Regards,
Chris

chrisf wrote:Currently I looking for the way to trigger a reload of the current directory shown in Dolphin

KIO's CopyJob triggers a reload of the view where a file was added with

Code: Select all

org::kde::KDirNotify::emitFilesAdded( url.url() );

see http://code.woboq.org/kde/kdelibs/kio/k ... .html#1756

Maybe you can use the same approach?