What are other 3rd parties doing for licence management?

HFCDev · 2022-02-10T18:36:24+00:00

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Hi,

I started looking at the OTDS licence management API as a possible solution to the problem of storing a licence key that you simply need to access at start up prior to getting the db connection. Right now, ours is stored in the opentext.ini file. Literally the only reason for doing that is so we can get the licence key at startup, prior to the database connection being guaranteed.

My hope is to do one of two things: 1) take advantage of the license API that OpenText provides, or 2) make sure we don't apply any overrides until after at least the patching has been done. At that point, I think we have a guaranteed db connection.

-Hugh Ferguson

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Nizar Ghazal

Maybe not the sort of answer you're looking for, but I've implemented "licensing" for our own module in the database.

The reason being that we've traditionally used the $KERNEL Module License utils which talks to OTDS on our behalf, to retrieve the contents of the license file. But if OTDS is down, unresponsive, not up yet, etc. it causes a bit of a headache as we can't "re-initialize" later on a live system.

So what I did instead: the "license" object, or the fields that constitute a license, were broken into LLConfig objects that have a standard way of being saved and retrieved. I submit an assoc of values keyed to the specific LLConfig object in a custom admin page.

Since LLConfig requires a database connection and a program context, the way I implemented it was to use __DelayedInit() which is a new-ish post-init method that instead runs after the regular startup __init(). The important tidbit being it's at a point where a DB connection exists and a prgCtx is being used to run it.

So, what that means is that I write several records to KIni, and on server startup, I read KIni to check the module state and register its components accordingly.

As an aside: LLConfig also supports the new secrets framework, so if I need to encrypt any of the values, it's as easy as setting a value like fIsSecret to true, and it'll know how to retrieve the value, itself.

HFCDev

I like the idea of __DelayedInit(). We have something similar in our module called __InitLater which we added ourselves because it didn't exist way back. It has the added bonus of allowing to patch any overrides we apply (i.e. orphans that do the "Chris Webster" method of overriding core) as it runs after the patching does. If that's built in, I'm going to have to have a look at it.

-Hugh

Appu Nair

OTDS API can work partly but OT told me that we cannot keep our licenses there or rather what you see in swagger is for OT internal use :).You could try your luck because about 2 years passed since we asked.

https://forums.opentext.com/forums/support/discussion/302092/custom-license-operation

I was able to place a temporary license in OTDS through Oscript but couldn't go further :)

So I went the old way made licensing part of my module.