Licensing

Licensing is an important topic to decide if an add-on is accessible or whether its offered functionalities should be hidden because the license does not own specific characteristics.

In general each add-on is a micro-service implementing a specific interface and exposing different capabilities to integrate into docupike's ecosystem. That said one can say that add-ons are encapsulated, responsible and self-sufficient software. The API-based communication is the only way docupike and add-ons can communicate and exchange data.

Because of this perspective docupike shifts as much responsibility to add-ons as possible to transfer control about add-on related aspects. Licensing is also considered as add-on related why the decision maker should be the add-on itself.

Technical workflow#

docupike licenses allow to include add-on specific information and should therefore serve as main resource in the decision process. This is the preferred way. To expose the license to registered add-ons docupike will embedded these information into each request sent to the add-on. The add-on can access the license beside of other information from the HTTP-Header data. The content is JSON encoded and should be decoded before accessing it:

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{
    "settings": [],
    "docu": {
        "url": "http://url-to-docupike.cloud/api",
        "apikey": "ey...."
    },
    "license": [
        {
            "title": "Prod 1",
            "objects": 100,
            "attributes": {
                "prop1": "value1",
                "prop2": "value2",
                […]
            }
        },
        {
            "title": "Prod 2",
            "objects": 100,
            "attributes": {
                "prop1": "value1",
                "prop2": "value2",
                […]
            }
        },
        […]
    ]
}

License checks#

License checks should be an essential part of each request processed by the add-on which is described above. Because license information can change over time the license checking should be done on each request the add-on receives. These guarantees that the add-on can react on changes in the license.

Another case is the add-on registration procedure which is the first interaction between add-on and docupike. docupike's add-on infrastructure allows add-ons to decide whether a registration is possible or not. The main use-case here is again license related but could be something else also. In general the registration process should be prevented if license requirements are not met at all from add-on perspective. If the add-on decides to permit the registration process because of unmet dependencies it should return HTTP-Code 403 Forbidden. Optionally the add-on can add a short problem description to its response:

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HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Content-Type: text/plain

Unsufficient license to register add-on.

The same flow also applies to enable hook: