Creating a Feature

You can create a new feature in the Producer Portal from the Feature page of the Package Products pages.

Tip:Save time by starting with a copy of an existing feature. Select the feature you want to copy, click Copy, type a new feature name, make any other necessary changes, and save the new feature. This approach can save time and reduce the chance for errors.

To create a feature

Click Products > Features. This link opens the Feature page.

Click Add New Feature.

Provide values for the following fields:

Feature Creation Fields

Field

Description

Feature Name

Name to uniquely identify the feature. The name can contain 30 characters or less when using FlexNet Licensing technology, or 64 characters or less for other licensing technologies. The name cannot contain spaces. The characters can be ASCII characters, numbers, periods, underscores, or hyphens.

Important:For FlexNet Publisher, the supported character set is restricted to lowercase alphabet (a-z), uppercase alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), and underscore (_). Other than for legacy applications still in production, the hyphen (-) is no longer supported.

Version Format Type

Select a Fixed or Date-Based version format.

See Creating a FlexNet Publisher Licensing Toolkit License Generator (VCG) Configuration for more information about this property.

Version

If a Fixed version format is selected, enter the latest (highest-numbered) version of this feature that is supported by a generated license certificate. For FlexNet Licensing technology, the version consists of numbers and at most one decimal point, with a ten character maximum, for example, 1 or 1.5. For custom license technologies, this is a string with a maximum length of 64 characters.

Description

Describe the characteristics of this feature that make it unique.

Units

For FlexNet Usage Management users, Units specifies the units to be used for usage reporting. For example, if your usage-capture clients are capturing usage of data, you may want to label the reported counts as bytes or kilobytes or gigabytes.

Units and Scale (below) work together to describe what the metered feature is counting.

Scale

For FlexNet Usage Management users, Scale is the feature scale. It represents how much is a unit for usage reporting purposes. For example, if your usage-capture clients are capturing usage of data in bytes but you want to report usage in kilobytes, enter 1024 for Scale.

Units (above) and Scale work together to describe what the metered feature is counting.

State

A feature can be in one of two states—Draft or Deployed.

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Draft: A feature is created as a draft that can be modified or deleted. Both draft and deployed features can be added to a feature bundle or a product in a draft state.

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Deployed: A deployed cannot be modified or deleted. If a feature bundle or product is deployed, all the draft features it contains are also deployed. After a feature is deployed to use in production, it cannot be deleted or modified.

New features start out in a Draft state. A feature’s state cannot be changed on the Create a Feature page. To change a feature’s state after it has been created, use the Change State control on the Feature page (Products > Features).

Vendor String

Used to override for specifically this feature, a vendor string defined in a license model. In addition to accepting an explicitly specified string, this field can accept, enclosed in curly braces, one of several predefined substitution variables or the name of a custom attribute. Use of this field is controlled by the FlexNet Operations license, and a user must be assigned a role that includes the Set Feature Override permission.

Notice

Used to override for this feature, a notice string defined in a license model. In addition to accepting an explicitly specified string, this field can accept, enclosed in curly braces, one of several predefined substitution variables or the name of a custom attribute. Use of this field is controlled by the FlexNet Operations license, and a user must be assigned a role that includes the Set Feature Override permission.

Serial Number

Used to override for this feature, a serial number defined in a license model. In addition to accepting an explicitly specified string, this field can accept, enclosed in curly braces, one of several predefined substitution variables or the name of a custom attribute. Use of this field is controlled by the FlexNet Operations license, and a user must be assigned a role that includes the Set Feature Override permission.

Counted

Determines whether a feature is counted. Choose from

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Yes

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Do Not Override

Choosing a value, other than Do Not Override, overrides the value set in the license model.

Reusable

Determines whether this feature is reusable (only applies to metered features). Choose from

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Yes

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Do Not Override

Choosing a value, other than Do Not Override, overrides the value set in the license model.

Client Uniqueness

This property allows you to specify which combination of unique identifiers defines a group. This capability allows multiple members of same group can check out this feature and the checkout count is incremented by 1 only. This property must be used with counted licenses only.

For example, if you set this to Group Mask = User, the user can check the feature out as many times as they are required to and they only increment the checkout count by 1. The first time the user checks out the feature, the checkout count is incremented by 1, but subsequent checkouts of that feature on different machines do not affect the checkout count.

As another example, if you set this Group Mask = Host, then when the first user checks out a feature from Machine A, the checkout count is incremented by 1. Subsequent checkouts by different users from that same machine do not affect the checkout count.

This configuration overrides the value set for the FlexNet license model. Choices include:

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Do Not Override (default): Do not override the configuration defined for the associated license model.

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Group Mask (User, Host, Display, Vendor Defined): Define the combination of criteria that create a unique group.

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None: Each checkout request is uniquely counted.

These fields are only valid for FLEX licenses. See also Creating a License Model.

Note:For users of the FlexNet Publisher Licensing Toolkit, consult the documentation on the DUP_GROUP keyword.

Note:If necessary, click the Reset button to reset all the feature fields.

Complete the feature creation process by clicking either Save, Next, or Add New Feature.

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Click Save to save the feature.

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Click Next to save the feature and show the Feature Bundles page.

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Click Add New Feature to save the feature and start to create another feature.

Tip:After a feature has been saved, the history of its state changes can be viewed by clicking the View History button.