chuzwuzzaI want to sell each customer a range of versions of my software, something like the current release and the next one. Eg:Alice buys 1.1 and 1.2Bob buys 1.2 and 1.3
I think I can use a custom feature field to identify the versions allowed by each product key. But I see a problem - if Alice is using 1.3 and tries to activate it, it'll have to actually activate before calling getFeatureValue, decide it's the wrong version and immediately deactivate. If it somehow fails to deactivate then she can't go and legitimately activate version 1.3 on another computer.
This would be more realistic with a manual activation since it would then require the extra step of a manual deactivation which she might not complete.
Is there a way to check the fields without activating, or to issue a product key that works for several versions?
I can't issue two products keys because then Alice can use 1.1 on one computer and 1.2 on another computer at the same time.
Well, this is a convoluted scenario, and likely confusing to customers, but you can make it work if you want to.
Using custom license fields is the way to handle this. If Alice activates your software, and she has the wrong version installed, then you can simply tell her the maximum version she is allowed to have installed and give her a link to that version. Then she can uninstall the newer version and install the old version. She doesn't even have to reactivate.
Does that make sense?
chuzwuzza> Well, this is a convoluted scenario, and likely confusing to customers, but you can make it work if you want to.
It's much simpler than I made it sound 😛 Just "buy now and get the next version free"
> Using custom license fields is the way to handle this. If Alice activates your software, and she has the wrong version installed, then you can simply tell her the maximum version she is allowed to have installed and give her a link to that version. Then she can uninstall the newer version and install the old version. She doesn't even have to reactivate.
I guess the issue is to see activation as something that happens to the product key, not the software. So we tell the customer yes, you've activated this product key but you have not activated this software because the version number is too high.
I think it would be better but not essential to have thing kind of capability built into LimeLM so the end users don't have to understand that distinction.
