|
For most applications, the standard licensing options that Sheriff provides should be sufficient. However, some applications might require extended licensing features, such as version control, access level control etc. There are two ways of customising a Sheriff licence policy:
1. Feature Access Control You may classify your application into various levels of feature and your users only need to pay for the level of feature they want. The feature access level can be set from 0 to 99999. Apart from using the access level to control features, it is possible to use it for controlling other aspects of your application; for instance, you may use it to control your application's version. Alternatively, you may use it to control a combination of features, using the first two digits for controlling your version number and the remaining three digits for controlling access level, for instance. Feature access level information is embedded in the standard licence key. There is one API function that is related to this, namely SLS_QueryLicence, which is used to retrieve the access key 2. Publisher Data Publisher Data is designed for customising your licence policy and is kept together with the product's licence key in the licence file. Publisher Data occupies a space up to 32 bytes; the format and meaning of the data is up to the publisher. Publisher Data is stored in an encrypted format. Publisher Data may be set or retrieved by using the appropriate Sheriff API functions: Publisher Data is set by calling SLS_SetPublisherData and retrieved by calling SLS_GetPublisherData. Therefore, although Publisher Data is stored with the Licence Key it does not form part of Licence Key string and is not passed back to the client with the Licence Key. Publisher Data has to be keyed in by the user either via SlsAdmin or the publisher's application i.e. Publisher Data can be entered or displayed via SlsAdmin, where this has been used as the licensing tool. |