Alternative to adding license code in solution

[MSPJ]

I wasn't sure how to title this question, but here's my question:

I have a software protection solution for my runtime product - I use Eleckey from Sciensoft.  The basic licensing function works as an EXE wrapper. and I have that implemented fine, integrates with my software seller and my self-hosted activation server. All good.

However, advanced features (such as being able to activate specific features) require adding code to the solution - they support several languages, including C#, VB.NET, VC.NET, VB, VC++, Delphi, and C++ Builder.  I'm trying to figure out if there's any way a filemaker runtime could communicate with an external program built using one of these.  In other words, if I could build a separate application that incorporated the advanced license code, is there some way a runtime could talk to it - as an alternative to actually incorporating that code in the filemaker solution itself.

Even better would be some kind of plugin that let me incorporate that code directly in the solution in some way - but I haven't come across anything like that.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks,

Michael

[Ocean West]

The issue with any "plugin" for FileMaker the code has to execute once the user has authenticated to the database - even if the user is logged in with a very basic account. Any processing that is done is after users entry point.

Not too dissimilar with 

 

Potentially using something like 360Works Scriptmaster could work with a third party tool and you could purchase and distribute a custom plugin made with ScriptMaster but haven't tried. 

Your goal is to prevent piracy of your runtime solution. There was one solution  while back that used a standard USB Key which was a physical object required to run the solution.

http://content.24usoftware.com/SimpleHASP

[MSPJ]

Hi - thanks for the input and link to that (long!) discussion.  Not sure this totally relates though to what I'm trying to do.  I have successfully implemented a commercial exe wrapper.  That is, users install the trial version, and in order to get more than 30 days use, they have to activate it with a code they get when they purchase.  However, there's no way using the wrapper to interact with the solution itself so that my runtime can determine if someone paid for additional features - and enable them if they did.  That's the part that must be implemented in C++, C#, etc.  

I suppose I could look into creating my own plugin using the code from Sciensoft. I suspect that won't be particularly easy.  

So I wondered if there was instead a way for Filemaker to interact with a separate program that implemented that API. I'm not sure if that even makes sense though.

Michael

[MSPJ]

In case anyone looks at this in the future, wanted to let you know that I believe I've come up with a decent workaround.  I'm still working out the details, but it appears I can sell modules and have the seller use an http post to update the original account in my activation server with the new licensing info.  Then, I can use Insert from URL to do an http post to retrieve license information from the server and determine if a user has the upgraded license.  It isn't seamless, as the user has to manually enter their original activation key again since I still haven't figured out a way to communicate with the eleckey API from within Filemaker.  (It might be that Scriptmaster could do it, but I probably won't invest the time to try right now).  But it does get me a way to do a poor man's (person's) version of separately licensing modules .