I've dutifully spent an hour searching past threads, but I can't find the info (except for a tantalizing comment from Cobalt Sky).

I have made a runtime solution that requires two commercial plugins. I won't be selling this solution; it is intended for our own people in the field to use on laptops. I have purchased them, three-seat licenses for development locally.

The problem is, when the runtime with the plugins is installed on a new machine, I get a registration screen, as the plugin detects a new machine.

Is this normal? If I needed to buy a license for each machine that would be using the plugins, the user would still be required to enter the registration code on install, right? How do I know how many licenses to buy, when I don't know how many copies of the runtime I will be using?

I'm not trying to avoid paying my proper fees, but is it possible to bundle a plugin with a runtime and have it be pre-registered, independent of the machine that will be using it?

The tantalizing Cobalt Sky comment was a mention of a startup script that auto-registers a plugin. Would this work? Could I hardcode the registration number into a script & have the script fill it in on initial install (then set a done flag so it doesn't do it on every startup)?

Steve Brown

You can purchase a developer license for most plug-ins. You use this license in your startup script. Check with the company that makes the plug-in.

Hi Steve,

As Ralph has suggested, the means by which a plug-in can be registered varies from vendor to vendor, so you need to check the specification provided for the specific plug-ins that you plan to use.

That said, a majority of plug-ins do provide an option to pass the required registration code to the plug-in via a function call - which can be included in your start-up script. More often than not this applies to user-specific licensing as well as to site and developer licenses.

Thanks for the tip(s). I'm using the Frontbase SQL plugin, and SMTPit. I'll check with both to see about the startup function call. I find myself balking at paying a total of $1,300 for developer's licenses so I can put my runtime on perhaps six laptops in the field.

Steve Brown