Read Engine Version

Hi,

Is there a possiblity to read the engine version (e.g. com / extra etc.) without loading the engine via engine_open (e.g. by calling any public inteface methods of ackutll.dll)?

Regards,
Timo

http://www.conitec.net/beta/aedition.htm

I want to read the engine edition WITHOUT (!) opening the engine. From all I know the "edition" variable is part of the ENGINE_VARS framework and therefore only accessible after calling engine_open.

Regards,
Timo

There is a way through the user key, but if I told you I had to kill you.

From the engine, AFAIK the only way is the edition variable. For what do you need the edition before opening the engine?

I'm currently writing an easy to use publisher for my editor
During the publishing process it would be of great help to check if wed is able to generate wrs files.

Additionally checking the editon could give me the ability to give more user-specific help & auto complete.



Actually i'm a little bit irrititated. From all I understood the "logic" for decompiling the key is in ackutl.dll. This DLL is called from wed.exe and acknex.dll . The DLL has the public symbols:
FN_ACKUTL01 to FN_ACKUTL08 and "long nAckUtl1" to "long nAckUtl8".
Probably those functions are responsible for checking the acknex version =) So there must be some kind of " ackutlDLL->CheckKeyVersion..." (even though the name is encrypted).

But okay, I see that those are pretty internals, and you do not want to make such things public

Regards,
Timo

Or you could just go the dirty way and check the existance of the key files.
key8c.dta for commercial edition, key8p.dta for professional and so on.

ahh nice idea
That's the way to go.. As I do not really need to verify those dta files, that's sufficient. Thanks a lot for this easy & good idea

Unfortunately it's not so easy, as the "c" and "p" are not necessarily related to the edition. But I'll check if there's some consistent rule with the key names.

what about an simple way...open the engine -> get the value -> close engine .... go ahead?

of course possible, but open the engine takes a long time. if you have e.g. 3 engine versions on your computer this can be pretty annoying.

As already said, that is just a usability thing, and far from beeing obligatory. It would just have been nice, if there was a way.

Ok, you can determine the edition from the key name. It works only for A8 though, key names had no relation to the edition with A7.

key8e or key8b -> extra
key8c -> commercial
key8 or key8p -> pro

Thanks a lot.
key8s --> free?

Just to give you an idea, what this feature is about: http://www.dev-software.com/public/LED/PublishProcess/PublishProcess.mp4

(only shameless advertising - no real relevance to the keys question )

Nice feature. I had to do a batch-file for this.