Infralution Support

wout · Joined: 27 Jul 2011 Posts: 16

The max product info string is max 100 characters long, although I don't see any theoretical limits in the documentation.

I need to store more information in there (up to maybe a few kb), is this limitation removed in the newer ILS versions? Currently we're using 4.7.2.0 still. I'm in the midst of implementing some new stuff so I'd prefer upgrading after I implement the new features.

- Wout

wout · Joined: 27 Jul 2011 Posts: 16

In the database the limit is 450 characters, however only 100 are stored. Seems some truncation is going on somewhere. 450 will be workable at present, so maybe there's a truncation bug?

- Wout

Infralution · Joined: 28 Feb 2005 Posts: 5027

The maximum SQL Server string field is 450 characters long. This limit affects the maximum license key that can be stored. This corresponds to a license key with ProductInfo of 100 characters.

ProductInfo was really only designed for relatively short strings. If you have large amounts of data in ProductInfo it results in very long unwieldy license keys. If you are using authenticated licensing then Version 5 provides an alternative (much better) way of transferring large amounts of data to the application using "AuthenticationData". The AuthenticationData is uploaded to the Authentication Server and when the license key is authenticated the AuthenticationData is download to the application and saved in the license file and can be accessed via the AuthenticatedLicense.AuthenticationData property.
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Infralution Support

wout · Joined: 27 Jul 2011 Posts: 16

Infralution · Joined: 28 Feb 2005 Posts: 5027

The limit is not on storing the ProductInfo but on storing the generated LicenseKey. With hex encoding each character of ProductInfo takes at least 2 characters to represent in the key string - but with the hypens and encryption blocks it works out more.

The maximum possible length ProductInfo that would still generate a license key small enough to be stored in an SQL Server database string field (max size of 450) is actually around 160 characters (depending on other license parameters such as key strength). Since we didn't really anticipate users wanting to generate such large keys the user interface limits the ProductInfo to 100 characters to avoid issues.

Note that with an Access database backend the max string field size is 255 and so the maximum ProductInfo is around 100 characters.

We could change the user interface to allow larger ProductInfo when generating keys and display an error if the maximum key size is exceeded - but there still will be a limit. If we were to change this it would be in Version 5 only. We are not planning another Version 4 release.

In version 4 it may be possible for you to work around the user interface limitation by writing your own custom generator that displays you own user interface for the user to enter the ProductInfo (see the Custom Generator sample project). You still would be limited to around 160 characters of ProductInfo.

In your original post you indicated that you wanted to store up to kB of data in ProductInfo. This is not going to be possible. For this size of data you should use AuthenticationData (new in Version 5) - which is stored in a non-indexed memo field and so is not limited in size.
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Infralution Support

wout · Joined: 27 Jul 2011 Posts: 16

Ah so the LicenseKey.Key column is the limiting factor, that wasn't clear to me. I'll try out how far I can stretch the boundaries with our own custom UI for entering the product info, thanks for the hint!

- Wout

Infralution · Joined: 28 Feb 2005 Posts: 5027

We have removed the 100 character user interface limit in the just released Version 5.4.4 of ILS. Now you will get an error message if you attempt to use Product Info that generates a key too long for the database field.
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Infralution Support