Description of the validation process

Suppose that your customers want to get a refund after purchasing or cancel their subscription, you can now block their access to your workbook. This is possible thanks to the validation feature of XLS Padlock handled by the FS Subscription kit: you can configure your compiled workbook EXE to check the validity of the customer's subscription regularly.

This feature is only available if online activation is also used.

Possible uses:

you sell Excel workbooks and you want to block access to them if end users ask for refunds.

you want to control who can access Excel workbooks regularly.

To activate the validation feature, fill in the base validation URL field.

In the Base Validation URL field, enter the base URL as defined previously (see Base URL for activation) on your web server followed by /dosubvalidation/{product path} (a final slash / is not mandatory) and replace {product path} with the FastSpring product path associated to your workbook (and defined in workbooks.json).

In our case, it would be:

https://www.mywebsite.com/subscription/dosubvalidation/markbook-demo

Then, define the frequency of validation and what should happen if the validation fails. Please refer to the XLS Padlock User Guide for further details about each setting.

Recompile your workbook EXE with XLS Padlock.

The compiled workbook EXE can now perform validation at startup:

Suppose that you blocked the access of your customers (by cancelling their subscription) or if the subscription expired, they will get this error (returned by the web application):

Otherwise, if validation is successful, the compiled workbook EXE continues its execution.

During validation, the FS kit also checks the subscription’s status.

If the subscription status is different than “Active”, validation will be refused.

This ensures that only paying customers with active subscriptions are validated, and therefore, may access the workbook.