In our system we use VPE (Virtual Print Engine from IdealSoftware) to write invoices, reports and further more.
When we write our code in the Appbuilder we just drag and drop a OCX-objekt (a VPEngine ActiveX Controll Class 6.00) from the Palette in to the program. After that we can use VPE in our programs. On our developers machines we have a SDK (Software Development Kit) of VPE installed. All this works fine.
But...
We also have programs wich is written by text-based code (html-files with speedscript or *.p-files). Programs that are used from Webserver or a Appserver. If we want to use VPE in the code we have to write the statement:
DEFINE VAR chlista as COM-HANDLE.
CREATE "VpeControl.VpeControl.60" chlista CONNECT NO-ERROR.
And after that we can use VPE to do what we want. (If we have an installation of VPE on the server where the code is running.)
If we dont have an installation of VPE on the server where the code is running we can´t use VPE.
And the installation of VPE that we must have on the server is a Software Development Kit-installations or a "special agreement installation".
But the problem is that we do not always have our customers webservers in our building. As we dont have them in our building we have to buy more licenses from IdealSoftware. And the price for this is 150 EUR for each customer. This is the "special agreement installation license".
We have just bought 20 such licenses and we think this is much money. Especially when we just have bought the Software Development Kit to the price of 5000 EUR to develop programs with VPE with our Appbuilder.
Is there anyone who have experienced this problem?
We have more than 350 programs which uses VPE so we cant just switch to another product.
Jörgen Katz
Karlstad
Sweden