How to determine Commercial or Community versions.

[AndyP]

Ok, I've search the dictionary and as far as I can see there is no way to determine if an existing stack is being opened in the Commercial or the Community version of LiveCode.

There is the version function but that returns 6.5.0 for the Commercial and the Community versions with no other info.

Any ideas or is this for Feature Requests?

[FourthWorld]

The engine behavior between both versions should be the same, with the exception of one feature: the ability to password-protect a stack script is in Commercial only, since of course it wouldn't make sense in a GPL-governed work. In all other respects they're the same. What do you want to do differently in each?

[AndyP]

Thanks for your reply Richard.

I'm developing a plugin for LiveCode that initially will be a commercial offering.
The demo version of this generates password protected stacks which show the result of a templated stack bild but not the scripts generated to allow evaluation of the plugin. This obviously will not be an option in the Community version.
For openess and politeness I would like to inform a Community user that the plugin is a Commercial offering and will not work in the Community version.

I'm thinking that I could prehaps trap the Password error but a built in way to determine the version would be a better option.

[FourthWorld]

Your willingness to provide a nice warning is laudable, but I'm afraid the engine is less flexible: for the security of password-protected stacks, the Community Edition can't open them at all.

[AndyP]

Hmm...Yep, I should have tested (realised) that earlier

So for me that's back to my old standby of reading and writing encrypted text files to be processed by the stacks.

Thanks for your comments and insight.

[FourthWorld]

Of it's designed to be used only with Commercial I wouln't rewrite it just to provide a more graceful way to tell Community users it's not designed fire them. They'll figure it out soon enough when the IDE tells them as they try to open it.

[Mark]

Hi Andy,

You can make an unprotected stack with a custom property containing your protected stack. Put this handler into the stack script of the unprotected stack:

Code: Select all

on preOpenStack
   try
      set the password of this stack to "test"
      set the password of this stack to empty
      go the cMyProtectedStack of this stack in new window
      close stack "My Unprotected Splash Stack"
   catch myErr
      beep
      answer error "Sorry, you can't use this utility with the community version of LiveCode."
   end try
end preOpenStack

Now you can warn the user if he tries to open your stack with the community edition.

Kind regard,

Mark

[AndyP]

Thanks Mark.

That's a good solution.

[splash21]

I came across this thread by chance and I'm glad I did. Best tip I've seen for a while - well done, Mark

[Mark]

Thanks

[[-hh]]

..........

[Mark]

Hi,

That's a great solution, but it won't work with Revolution. I don't know if it will work with MetaCard; I suspect it won't. When RunRev changes the engine name (which will happen eventually), your script will break. If you don't want the script to be broken, you could use

Code: Select all

function commercial
  set the idemDel to slash
  return (the last item of the addres contains "commercial")
end commercial

Obviously, this works in the IDE only. It won't work in standalones.

Kind regards,

Mark

[[-hh]]

..........

[Mark]

Hi Hermann,

The use of slash hasn't changed since the MetaCard times.

Kind regard,

Mark

[FourthWorld]

Since the one reliable difference between the Community and Commercial editions is that the former doesn't allow the setting of stack passwords, we could use that as a test:

Code: Select all

function IsCommunityEdition
   try
      do "set the password of this stack to Anything"
   catch tErr
      return true
   end try
   set the password of this stack to empty -- undo
   return false
end IsCommunityEdition

It might also be good to have a built-in function for this. Has anyone here submitted such a request?