Infralution Support

JohnnyRoy · Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 4 Location: New York, USA

I’ve been evaluating your product and I am very impressed with its capabilities and price. It does everything I need except for one thing that I haven’t seen demonstrated.

How can I add a product prefix to the license key for humans to read?

We have products which are plug-ins to a host application and our customers will often buy several of them and, in the past, have used the wrong key to license a product. This has caused a lot of support related issues. I need a way for our support personnel and customers to quickly look at a key and determine which product it is for. Just a prefix of a few letters will do.

Do I have to write a custom key generator to do this? (and will the license provider accept it?) or is it more complicated than that?

~jr

Infralution · Joined: 28 Feb 2005 Posts: 5027

To generate keys with a product prefix you would need to purchase the License Tracker source code and modify the method that generates the keys. This would be relatively simple. With a little more work you could add a "ProductPrefix" field to the database and to the Product Dialog so that you can add the appropriate prefix to each product.

You can try this out with the evaluation version of ILS by writing your own simple license key generator that uses the the EncryptedLicenseProvider.GenerateKey method and adds the prefix.

You can handle the prefixed key in your application in three different ways:

1. Derive a new class from LicenseInstallForm and override the InstallLicenseKey method to strip the prefix before calling the base method to install the key. The only disadvantage of this is that the key stored in the file then won't have the prefix.

2. Load/save the key yourself and strip the prefix before using EncryptedLicenseProvider.ValidateLicenseKey to check the key. See the Custom Licensed App for an example of using a custom install form and ValidateLicenseKey.

3. Once you purchase ILS and have the source code for EncryptedLicenseProvider you could modify the LoadLicense method to strip the prefix from the key.
_________________
Infralution Support

JohnnyRoy · Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 4 Location: New York, USA

Thanks, you guys Rock! That will work just fine. I just purchased your ILS product.

I gotta tell ya’, I was evaluating XEHO|Licensing but your product is much easier to work with and much more flexible. Like you, I hate activation and their serial number support seems to be an after-thought that was bolted on. Their solution is really inflexible and customer hostile. ILS was a breath of fresh air.

Thanks again for making a flexible licensing solution that is affordable for us “little guys”.

~jr

Guest · Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 7:42 pm Post subject:

Infralution · Joined: 28 Feb 2005 Posts: 5027

The reason LoadLicense is private rather than protected is largely historical. In general I agree - if there is no reason for a method to be private - then it should be protected to allow extensibility. There would be no issue with you changing this - and we will change the method to virtual protected in the next release.
_________________
Infralution Support