With the release of ActiveReports 7, a few changes have been made in the Licensing model. Here in this blog lets discuss a few important changes and licensing troubleshooting tips for ActiveReports 6 and ActiveReports 7.

Licensing in ActiveReports 7

About License Key Any license key supports up to 3 activations. That is, one serial key can be used to license ActiveReports on “three” machines at a time. Please make sure that you deactivate the key whenever you format your machine. Also, keep in mind that all 3 activations must be used by the same developer in order to be in compliance with the EULA. Also note that backward compatibility of ActiveReports 7 license keys is NOT possible, and an ActiveReports 7 key cannot be used to activate earlier versions. If you need to use a previous version of ActiveReports, please contact your sales representative.

Offline Licensing

As of now, offline licensing is not supported in ActiveReports 7.

How to License, if already installed on the system

In case you have already installed the trial version of ActiveReports 7 and want to activate it using the serial key after purchase, then you are suggested to run the License Manager from the Start Menu. On running the License Manager, an activation dialog will open up and will prompt you to enter the User Name, Organization, Email and Product Key. Once the details have been entered, click the ‘Next’ button to authenticate the license.

Error: "License already activated" / “Maximum Activations in use”

This error occurs when the maximum number of activations of the product are already in use. Since the key can be used only on three machines at a time, you first need to deactivate the controls on one of the three machines. If user has 3 licenses running at a time but one of those computers crashes or someone replaces a hard drive or new OS installation, then they cannot re-activate on the new machine. In such a case, please contact our Support team (you can submit an incident here.) Under such cases, one is suggested to get their key ‘reset’. On resetting the key all the earlier activations-deactivations of the key will get null and void. And thereafter one can start fresh and can activate the key on three different machines (at a time). In such cases, please contact our Support team (you can submit an incident here) with the following details:

• Serial Key
• Product
• Registered Email-id
• Customer Id
• Registered Name
• Company, if applicable

Please note that the key can be reset only ONCE.

Upgrade to ActiveReports 7

Upgrading your existing application to ActiveReports 7 from its older version is not at all cumbersome and one need not perform a long list of steps. ActiveReports 7 offers the ActiveReports Developer Upgrade tool for automatic upgrading of reports/projects. For further information, you can refer to the following documentation link: http://helpcentral.componentone.com/nethelp/AR7Help/OnlineEn/Upgrading%20Reports.html

Configure HTTPHandlers in IIS

In order to use ActiveReports HTTP handlers on the Web with ASP.NET, you must first configure the machine to use the handlers. Once, the ActiveReports HTTP handlers are configured, you can automatically run a report and view it in the browser from a URL. One need to perform a certain set of steps, as mentioned in the following links, to configure the HTTPHandlers on their machine: http://helpcentral.componentone.com/nethelp/AR7Help/OnlineEn/ConfigureHTTPHandlersinIIS7x.html http://helpcentral.componentone.com/nethelp/AR7Help/OnlineEn/ConfigureHTTPHandlers.html

Please note that HttpHandlers are only enabled if you purchased the Professional Edition.

You may also refer to the following documentation link to deal with other licensing related issues: http://helpcentral.componentone.com/nethelp/AR7Help/OnlineEn/arHOWLicensingActiveReports.html

Licensing in ActiveReports 6

ActiveReports 6 is no longer under active development, but is still used by a large number of customers. Some of the common issues are:

Error: ‘No license available’ or ‘Invalid User Data’

When trying to activate AR6 on your machine, you may face any of the following errors:

1. ‘No license available’ error: This occurs when the maximum number of valid activations has already been used.
2. ‘Invalid User Data’ error: This occurs when incorrect data (username or email-id) has been entered while activating the product.

Under these scenarios, you are requested to share your Serial Key, Email-id and the Username with the support team. They will check if the correct credentials are being used or not as per the database. If not, you will be provided with the correct credentials.

Offline Licensing

If you do not wish to install ActiveReports on your build machine or when your system is Firewall protected preventing you from activating ActiveReports on it, then you can try Offline licensing. Following are the steps for it:

1. Send your Machine ID along with your serial key to the Support team. The Machine ID can be generated by running the MachineIDGenerator.exe.
2. Support team will generate the Licensing xml and send it to you.
3. Run the Offline-Installer that uses the provided Licensing xml.

On completing the third step, the machine will get licensed. You may download the offline licensing tools from here.

Please refer to the our blog for detailed steps.

Accessing Report from External dll

When your application uses reports created in a different project, you may get the evaluation banner on running/deploying the project. Following steps will help resolving this issue:

1. Download and unzip ApplicationLicenseGenerator.zip to any desired location on your DEVELOPMENT PC.
2. Run the program "ApplicationLicenseGenerator.exe" with administrative privileges.
3. Browse to the compiled exe/dll of your base solution or the application that calls your compiled ActiveReports DLL.
4. Press the "Generate" Button. This generates *.exe/dll.DataDynamics.Licenses.dll
5. Place the DLL in the same directory as your compiled solution file. This completes this licensing process.

Before performing the above mentioned steps, please ensure that the project in which the reports are created contains the licenses.licx file with the correct entries.

Configure HTTPHandlers in IIS

In order to use ActiveReports HTTPHandlers on the Web with ASP.NET, you must first configure the machine to use the handlers. Please refer to the following documentation links which explains how to configure the ActiveReports handler mappings for running ActiveReports Web Applications on your machine: http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ActiveReports6/topic69.html http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ActiveReports6/topic85.html