Configuring the subscription product in workbooks.json

The steps below are for subscription products.

1. Edit the workbooks.json file stored on your server.
2. If not done, go to the WooCommerce admin page and create the subscription product that will be associated to your workbook. If you do not know how to do that, please see the WooCommerce documentation
3. In the WooCommerce admin page, choose Products and place the cursor over the subscription product you want. The ID will be displayed. On the screenshot below, it would be 13:

4. In the workbooks.json file, replace “product ID” with the product ID you obtained. In our case above, we would write “13”:

{
    "products": {
        "13": {
                …
                "variations": {
                "variation ID 1": {

5. You can then give the title you want to your workbook. This is purely informative and can be useful to help you navigate when configuring multiple workbooks:

{
    "products": {
        "13": {
            "title": "My workbook title",

6. Start Excel, open your Excel workbook and XLS Padlock.

Navigate to the “Activation Keys / Activation Settings” page. Click the “Copy” button near the “Application Master Key” field:

Paste this into workbooks.json for the value of the xlspadlockmasterkey entry. Based on the screenshot above, this would give:

{
    "products": {
        "13": {
            "title": "My workbook title",
            "xlspadlockmasterkey": "Pupil Markbook Sub Secret 112",
            "variations": {

                …

7. Back to XLS Padlock, choose Online Activation and click the “Copy” button near the “Security Private Key” field:

Paste this into workbooks.json for the value of the xlspadlockprivatekey entry. Based on the screenshot above, this would give:

{
    "products": {
        "31": {
            "title": "My workbook title",
            "xlspadlockprivatekey": "{6363CDED-3E14-465A-9E96-5B52C356F6CD}",
            "xlspadlockmasterkey": "Pupil Markbook Sub Secret 112",
            "variations": {

                    …

8. Now we will deal with the variations:

• if your subscription product does not contain any variations, enter “0” as the variation ID.
• Otherwise, if you have a variable subscription, you will have to create a “variation” block for each variation present in your product and configure the corresponding properties.

To obtain the variation ID, in your WooCommerce admin, choose your product in “Products”. Then, in “Product Data”, click the “Variations” tab and the variation ID are listed after each hash, as you can see them highlighted on the screenshot below:

Go to the workbooks.json and locate the “variation” block. Enter your variation ID for the first variation block. If your subscription product has no variation defined in WooCommerce, enter “0” as the ID. In our sample, we would enter 21 as below:

{
    "products": {
        "13": {
            "title": "My workbook title",
            "xlspadlockprivatekey": "{6363CDED-3E14-465A-9E96-5B52C356F6CD}",
            "xlspadlockmasterkey": "Pupil Markbook Sub Secret 112",
            "variations": {
                  21: {
                    "usehardwarelocking": 1,
                    "maxactivperorder": 2,
                    "keymaxdays": 180,
                    "shownagscreen": 0
                  },
…

9. Now we can configure the different properties for that variation:

• If you do not want to generate hardware-locked activation keys (NOT RECOMMENDED), change the usehardwarelocking entry from 1 to 0.
• Define the number of activations per order allowed thanks to the maxactivperorder entry. This lets you define on how many machines an end user (for instance who purchased your compiled workbook EXE) can activate the workbook. By default, it’s the value defined in the config.ini (see above).

Note: the order quantity is also taken in account. For instance, if the customer bought a quantity of 2 products and with maxactivperorder = 2, we would allow 4 activations.

1. If you want to generate activation keys that would display a nag screen (useful for trials), change the **shownagscreen** entry from 0 to 1.
2. Finally, if you want to set an expiration date or maximum number of runs / days, it is possible. Remember that XLS Padlock only allows one expiration mode: date, number of runs or number of days per activation key.
  1. For a maximum number of runs, define the entry named “**keymaxruns**” and set its value to the number of runs you want to allow.
  2. For a maximum number of days, define the entry named “**keymaxdays**” and set its value to the number of days you want to allow.
  3. For a fixed expiration date, define the entry named “**keyexpiredate**” and set its value to the date with the following mandatory format: YYYY/MM/DD

10. Repeat the same steps for all variations in your product. For instance, below you can see that we defined two variations (one with a fixed expiration date and another with a number of allowed days):

{
    "products": {
        "13": {
            "title": "My workbook title",
            "xlspadlockprivatekey": "{6363CDED-3E14-465A-9E96-5B52C356F6CD}",
            "xlspadlockmasterkey": "Pupil Markbook Sub Secret 112",
            "variations": {
                  21: {
                    "usehardwarelocking": 1,
                    "maxactivperorder": 2,
                    "keymaxdays": 180,
                    "shownagscreen": 0
                },
                  22: {
                    "usehardwarelocking": 1,
                    "maxactivperorder": 4,
                    "shownagscreen": 0
                },
            }
    …