In the last post, I talked about the various licensing changes in Flex 3 & FB3. I said that the way to create charting applications n Flex3, is to get a FB Pro license (as charting is not a separate product anymore) and enter the serial number in FB3 and then develop as usual. I also mentioned that the license.properties file has now been moved to a global location in Flex3from its usual “/frameworks” path in Flex 2.

Now, what if you are one of those IDE haters or prefer VI, EMACS, TextPad over any IDE then this causes a problem for you. You might have the FB Pro license number which includes the Charting & Data Visualization component license, but you might not have FB installed. Then the license.properties file does not exist and so you will get a Trial-Watermark on your chart as below, despite having the license key. This will not happen in Flex2, as the license.properties file resides in the SDK directory itself.

The way to go, is to use the flex-config.xml file. flex-config.xml is the configuration file contains most of the default compiler settings for the application and component compilers. In Flex3, we have added a license tag, where you can specify the compiler option for your Flex serial number.

flexbuilder3
your serial number here

So, the compiler will now pick up the options from the config file, even though license.properties file does not exist.

The good news for those who have FB installed and still want to use the command-line compiler is that the compiler also checks for the existence of the license.properties file, so you may not have to do the above steps and it would work as is for you without problems…