Types of Trial Licenses
You can provide the following types of trial licenses to your customers:
Days-based Trial License
Allows running the licensed application for a specified number of days (calendar-based).
Hours-based Trial License
Allows running the licensed application for the specified number of (total) hours.
>The trial period (counter) starts only when the licensed application is used for the first time. The license will not expire before its first usage begins (when the end date is not specified).
>Optionally, you can associate a (calendar-based) start date and an end date with a trial license. However, the license will expire as soon as any of the limits (trial days/hours/the calendar end date) is reached; irrespective of whether the license was used or not.
The following table lists a few scenarios for using a trial license:
|
Case# |
Trial Days |
Start Date |
End Date |
Usage |
|
1 |
30 |
None |
None |
>The licensed application can be used on any day, irrespective of the date. >The trial period will last for the next 29 days after the licensed application is first run. |
|
2 |
30 |
January 1, 2018 |
June 30, 2018 |
>The licensed application cannot be used before January 1st. >The trial period will last for the next 29 days after the licensed application is first run or up to June 30th (whichever is earlier). |
|
3 |
30 |
March 1, 2018 |
None |
>The licensed application cannot be used before March 1st. >The trial period will last for the next 29 days after the licensed application is first run. |
|
4 |
30 |
None |
March 30, 2018 |
>The licensed application can be used only before March 30th. >The trial period will last for the next 29 days after the licensed application is first run or up to March 30th (whichever is earlier). |
|
Case# |
Trial Hours |
Start Date |
End Date |
Usage |
|
1 |
1 |
None |
None |
The licensed application can be used for 1 hour, in total, without any date restriction. |
|
2 |
1 |
March 1, 2018 |
March 30, 2018 |
>The licensed application can be used for 1 hour, in total, between March 1st and 30th. >The license will expire either after one hour of (60*60 seconds) usage or on March 30th. |
|
3 |
1 |
March 1, 2018 |
None |
>The licensed application cannot be used before March 1st. >The license will last for a maximum of one hour. |
|
4 |
1 |
None |
March 30, 2018 |
The licensed application can be used for a maximum of one hour and before the end of March 30th. |
Security of a Trial License
The calculation of elapsed hours is not dependent on the system clock. Thus, even for systems that support access to clock ticks or its equivalent, the license cannot be used more than the maximum allowed hours.
The trial license security data is maintained in the persistence storage. This information is retained even after deleting the license. Subsequent addition of the same license will not allow usage beyond the expiration date/hours.
Also, since the trial license persistence storage is software vendor-specific, the corruption of the persistence storage of a specific software vendor does not affect others.
However, to create the persistence storage for standalone applications, it is important to call the sntlInitStandaloneSystem API function at the time of application installation.
For more details on system initialization, refer to Persistence Data-Dependent License Models.
NOTE The concept of trial license precedence is no longer supported with the Unified APIs.