Creating templates for a product

About templates

You can define one or more templates for each product. Templates give you a way to pre-define settings that you can reuse when creating licenses. You must have at least one template for each product. A default template, named default, is provided for each product you create. You can redefine this template as needed, including renaming it. You can add as many templates to each product as you need.

You can look at templates as a way of selling your applications. As an example, say that you have different ways of selling your product to small businesses versus corporate customers, such as different expiration terms, different features included, etc. You can make templates for each of these scenarios, eliminating the need to specify the details for each license you create.

Continuing with our example of corporate versus small business licensing, you might create a "Corporate" template that specifies the HostID type is Ethernet, the license type is Network (floating), and includes features F1 and F2, and each feature expires one year from activation. You can then create a "Small Business" template that designates the HostID type is Hostname, the license is Local (node-locked), and includes only feature F1, which expires 6 months from activation.

After creating these templates, whenever you create a license for a corporate or small business customer, you simply select the appropriate template to apply all the default conditions to the license automatically.

You can override any of the settings in a template when you create a license order. You can also enable/disable features by default in each template that the feature is included in, and as for other settings, override that default as needed.

A major benefit of these flexible templates is that once you add a template, if you add a feature to the product (e.g., and add-on sub-product) in the future, you can attach the feature to the template and assign its default values to the template.

How to create/edit a template

You create and edit templates using the Template tab in the Create New Product or Edit Product dialog (accessed from the Products page).

• To create a new template, click Create Template from the Template page.
• To edit an existing template, click the edit icon under the Action column of the Templates table.

This opens the Add New Template or Edit Template dialog, which let you define the template settings using the tabbed sections described below.

General tab

The settings you define under the General tab of the Template dialog include the following.

HostIDs tab

The HostIDs tab lets you specify the HostID(s) that will be used to lock the license, such as Ethernet, Hostname, IP Address, etc. When HostID locking is used, the proper HostID information must be supplied in order to activate the license.

The toggles at the top of the HostIDs tab let you choose whether to use HostID locking.

• If you do not want to lock the license to a HostID, select Not Locked from the top of the dialog.
• To use HostID locking, select Lock License To at the top of the dialog.

The available HostID types depend on which types are supported by the license generator being used, as shown in the following table.

LM-X License Manager lets you use multiple HostID types and lets you specify how many of each are required, as described below. For other license managers, you can select only one HostID type.

Specifying HostID locking when using an LM-X license generator

When using LM-X as the license generator, you can select one or more HostID types to lock the license to. You also specify the minimum and maximum number of each HostID type, the overall percentage of HostIDs that must match, and the overall number of HostIDs required, as described in the following sections..

Selecting HostID types

To select the HostIDs to lock the license to, click in the checkbox next to the desired HostID type.

For each HostID type selected, set the Minimum Required (0 to 16; defaults to 1) and the Maximum Allowed (1 to 16; defaults to 1). For example, if you require the IP Address, and additionally require one more HostID that can be the Username, Hostname, or IP Address, your settings would be:

Specifying Match Rate Percentage required for activation

The Match Rate % field lets you specify the percentage of HostIDs that must match for successful HostID verification. This lets you lock your software to multiple HostID values, but allow users to run the software if only a percentage of the HostID values are valid. For example, with the settings above, if you specify a match rate of 50%, the license can be activated using the IP Address and only one of the other HostID values. However, if you specify a match rate of 75%, the license activation will require that 3 of the 4 HostID types are given.

Specifying total number of HostIDs required for activation

The Min HostIDs field lets you specify the total number of HostIDs required to activate the license. For example, with the HostID min/max settings in the above table, you could specify that the user must enter a total of 2 out of the possible 4 HostIDs upon activation.

For more information about using HostIDs with LM-X, see the HostIDs section of the LM-X Developer's Manual, and the Knowledgebase article, "Which HostID should I lock my license to?" For more information about LM-X HostID match rate, see the HOSTID_MATCH_RATE section of the LM-X Developer's Manual, and the Knowledgebase article, "How to use HostID matching."

Specifying HostID locking for 3rd-party license generators

For license generators other than LM-X (FlexNet and Reprise), you specify whether to use HostID locking in a similar manner as described above for an LM-X license generator, by toggling the locking option on or off in the HostIDs tab.

For 3rd party license generators, you can select only one HostID type to lock the license to. The valid types depend on the license generator being used.

The settings for Min Allowed/Max Required and Match Rate percentage do not apply to 3rd-party license generators, because they do not include these features. Therefore, you will see that these selections are grayed out for 3rd-party license generators.

Features tab

The Features tab lets you select the features that should be included in the license by default. Select the checkbox next to any features that should be included in the template by default.

Settings tab

The Settings tab lets you define the settings for each feature included in the template, including the feature version and expiration type, which are required.

The expiration type can be Fixed, Days from Activation, or Permanent. If you select Fixed, set the date the license will expire (you can type in the date or select it using the calendar). If you select Days From Activation, enter the number of days the license will be valid after being activated.

In addition, you can enter custom text that will be part of the feature's license template in the Additional Settings edit box. For example, you could include XML code that will be part of xmllicgen input. One such example is specifying that sharing will be used by adding the tags that LM-X supports: <SETTING SHARE="HOST" />.

You can edit multiple features at once by clicking the Expand icon at the left of the Settings dialog to switch to Bulk Editing, shown below. This opens a left panel that lets you make the above settings for all features in the product at once. For example, if you have features F1, F2 and F3 included in the product template, and all share the same expiration settings, you can use Bulk Editing to set the expiration once for all three features.