Plugins and Runtimes

[spb]

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

[RalphL]

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.

[CobaltSky]

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.

[spb]

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