How to allow memberships only to update?

[Stein Inge]

Hello friends

Some of my software users are “members” in a club and some are not. This next release is free for members only. So my task is to filter out members and give them the free download, while non-members should be given a message of how to get a valid membership.

There are customer information saved in registry so it’s possible to get that information.

There is a Microsoft SQL server running with member information on the web server.

So I need to take the customer info from registry, send this to the server. The server has to search for this info and trigger a True/False to start the upgrade.

So my question it – how do I do all this?
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Extra:
And if this should be extra cool, then it would be nice to look at the membership expiration date in the server SQL DB and give the customer an option to renew the membership if it’s not older than one year. And if the expired membership is older than one year, then point the customer to the normal web shop for a full price.

And to make it even more cool, count the number of times a customer is downloading the same upgrade file. If it goes above 5, then give the user a message and send an e-mail to the admin (that is me) so I can check why this user have so much problems. Maybe a new CD in snail-mail would be better for this customer??

Any help would be appreciated and if you are offering your consulting services, please don’t hesitate to contact me at stein.inge@embla.no

Best regards
Stein Inge Haaland
CEO-Embla Norsk Familiehistorie AS
www.embla.no

[Ulrich]

Hello Stein,

unfortunately I can't give you a code example, because I don't code in ASP, and my probably PHP code wouldn't be of much help for you. But the mechanism to make something like this is not hard at all, see:

You say that you have access to the user's information through the registry, and the info is stored on a database as well. So what you have to do is send some relevant registration information to your server (serial number?) and check it on your server. To send the info from TrueUpdate you can use HTTP.Submit() or HTTP.SubmitSecure() to an appropriate ASP form on your server. You would receive the information, check it against your database, and send an answer (a response HTML page) back to TU.

On this HTTP response page, you would show instructions asking the user to renew his membership, or just tell that the membership is still valid. The "status" text could be inclosed in a CSS class name in the HTML, like this:

(html code here...)
<p class="valid">Hello John Doe, please proceed to download</p>
(or)
<p class="expired">Hello John Doe, please renew maintenance first</p>
(more html code...)

You can show the response in a "Scrolling HTML" dialog of TU, and then search the HTML (String.Search()) you received back from the server as response to your HTTP.Submit() for one of these specific and unique strings ("valid" or "expired") to know the status of the membership correspondent to the data you sent. If it is valid, jump to the proper download screen of your project after the user clicks Next, if expired jump to some other screen.


Ulrich

[jassing]

The easiest route to go would be to have an ASP page that would accept the "user information" in the url.

the ASP script would then query the sql database;and return a result.
If you do not encrypt it or somehow make it unique; this method could be easy to thwart.

You can use the http object to send & evaluate the response; and proceed or not.
I did this for a client using PHP & MYSQL; but the concept is the same..

For what it's worth; I wouldn't do this only in "trueupdate" I would also do this in your installer -- because then a member could simply download the update & then share it with non-members. having the installer do the check would prevent that from working...

That way the TrueUpdate could prevent the non-member from download; and the installer would prevent the installation on non-members systems.

ps: all that stuff you want as the 'extra cool' part is 100% doable in ASP.

basically you wont' do it in your installer/trueupdate -- you do it on the server side & the client side just evaluates a response.