Can you have more than 1 product with a preinstalled device license?

Yes

Summary

Question

Using FlexNet Operation (FNO) 2017 R1 along with FlexNet Embedded (FNE), when creating a device in FNO, you have the option to add preinstalled licenses. However, the functionality is falling a bit short of our needs, as there is only a button to add a product (no way to remove it). Also, there doesn?t appear to be any way to add more than one product. When you click Add, to add another product license, it just replaces the existing one.

Is there a means of getting FNO to add more than 1 product to a pre-installed license on a device? We have a large number of optional features that we want to be able to license on an ad-hoc basis. Creating Products with every combination of possible features would be very onerous. Note that in some instances the software will be installed in locations with no internet access.

We're aware that we can assign licenses via creating an entitlement of multiple products, and fulfilling a capability request (which we're intending to do for most customers with an internet connection). And we can also send the capability request as a file via other means if there is no internet connection, but the pre-installed license allows them to send just a license file to a customer without first generating a capability request, and is also the neatest way to handle dongle-based licenses (where we know the hardwareID in advance).

In both of these cases we'd appreciate the facility to generate a license file consisting of features from more than 1 product through FNO. At the moment, the only way around this is to use the licensefileutil that comes with FNE for these type of custom licenses that are distributed in a file (or loads of custom products in FNO). Are there any options available?

Answer

No, the FNO database schema does not currently allow this. Logically, in the service layer code, it could work, but there's no way to get FNO to call the service layer with the right parameters currently.

An alternate option would be to deliver "add-ons" in the buffer license if you want, by using a device model with both pre-installed and add-ons delivered in the buffer license. This does generate a completely new buffer license each time, not a series of incremental buffer licenses, but it's not clear that that wouldn't work for you. It doesn't require any cap request upload. You can't remove copies of mapped add-ons that are delivered in this format however (because it would be too easy to cheat by just not loading the new license file), so that might be a showstopper if you need that functionality.

Can you have more than 1 product with a preinstalled device license?