Is there a way to have ClearCase display icons in the Windows Explorer to denote the state of files/directories?

Question

For example, in TortoiseSVN, I can find out when a directory is out-of-date or checked out by looking at the images in the corner of the directory icon. However, I don't have that with ClearCase. Inside of Eclipse, I can see what I have checked in/out, but I'm not always inside Eclipse. It appears that I can right click on the file and I see "Check Out..." as an option if the file is not checked out and "Check In..." as an option if the file is checked out.

What I really want are images or icons to let me know visually what I have checked in and out through the Windows Explorer shell. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Currently, this is not done by any tool/plugin I know of, except for ClearCase Eclipse plugin (where a "recursive" option can be set, to show a "dirty" state on packages of a project if one of the files is checked out)

Since ClearCase is managed file-by-file, that would require a recursive request which may not be compatible with the speed a Windows explorer is supposed to refresh itself.

Answer 2

The best way I found to visually indicate which files are checked out or in is to set Windows Explorer to show file attributes for all of your ClearCase folders. Then you can determine which files are checking in or out by looking to see if the files are read-only or not. When the files are checked in, they are read-only; when they are checked out they are not read-only.

Answer 3

I wonder if it'd be possible to do it this way, with a little bit of Perl? Not particularly efficient, but it's a start...

Is there is a way to change a Windows folder icon using a Perl script?