Hi Hamker,
Installation isn't actually that difficult, until you hit a problem. We made a full switch some months ago in FlexCel from the old installers to the new smartsetup-based ones, and that indeed caused a spike of issues, but you have also to realize that tms has tens of thousands of customers. You will read here about everyone who had problems, but you won't hear about the much bigger group that just installed and had no issues.
The old setups were more mature, as they had 20 years of development, but the new ones are maturing really fast, and soon will be much better and issue-free than the old ones. Every problem we hear, we fix it. And it now gets fixed for all tms products. (before, most tms products had different installers, and if you fixed a but in say the FlexCel installer, the bug might still be there for the tms UI pack installer).
There were many reasons that made us completely rewrite the installers, but I am not going to mention them here. You can read about that in this post: TMS Software | Blog
the installation is possible as a download trial, after purchase I got a 256 byte file with the license information which is stored by a licence software to a unit called TdbLicense.dcu. The best and easiest way I´ve ever seen!!!
Doing binary installs is indeed simpler (that's what we do for the trials), but:
- Setup sizes are way bigger. FlexCel supports every platform that Delphi supports (iOS, Android, whatever) and providing binaries for all those platforms makes the install quite big. To give you an idea, the registered FlexCel setup (with source code) is 52 mb and you can use it to install in Delphi from XE to Delphi 12. A trial only for delphi 12 is about 320 mb, and you need another 320 mb for d11, d10.4, d10.3, d10.2, d10.1, d10, dex8...dxe (ok the older delphi versions are smaller because there aren't so many platforms, but still).
- There is never a 100% compatibility with the dcus we create here and the ones you have in your machine. For example, 12.2 had binary incompatibilities with 12.1 See https://blogs.embarcadero.com/rad-studio-12-2-athens-inline-patch-1-available/#Publicly_Reported_Issues_Addressed_by_this_Patch and search for RSS-1944
But 12.2 patch 1 introduced new binary incompatibilities that were addressed in 12.3. And there are reports that 12.3 introduced yet other binary incompatibilities. Or, if you want a real-world example: For licensing reasons tms Webcore is distributed as a binary. See as an example Web Core 1.2 on Delphi 10.2.2 not working (this is delphi 10, not 12, and the same story as ever).
I guess we could provide binary installers for 12.1, 12.2, 12.2 patch 1, 12.3 and so on, but remember each is 320 mb. With a source installer you can install in your version of delphi, and have the dcus compiled for that exact version. Again, your particular case might be that you had no issues with binary installers and issues with source installers, so you conclude binary are better, but a lot of people have the opposite experience. - I just believe that a component should come in full source code form, because it allows you to install in whatever delphi version you want, without having to wait for us to provide you a binary setup. Should tms disappear tomorrow (let's hope not!
) you will still be able to install FlexCel in Delphi 13 with a little of work. You would be stuck forever in Delphi 12 if you had a binary setup.
Edit1: After installation of the trial everything is ok agian, the storage of the license information seems to be the problem...?
I am not sure I am getting the problem but I want to make this very clear: Do not install the trial if you have the registered version While the trial in general works fine (we don't want you to have an trial experience where you are constantly dealing with nags), it has limitations, and it won't work outside of the IDE.
There is no license information at all in the FlexCel setup to be stored. The trials are just physically different from the registered version in that they have extra lines of code added to add limitations. You can't convert a trial to a registered version by adding a code as you mentioned before.
If you have issues with the registered version, please post your log here, and we will figure out what's wrong. As said, it is very early yet in our switching to the new setup and there are teething issues, but the registered installers do work