Capability Requests and Responses

When your licensing code communicates with FlexNet Operations, the communications involve capability requests and capability responses. A capability request is generated by the client (requesting features that it will acquire). The request data contains some combination of a host identifier, one or more desired features, and other optional data to pass to FlexNet Operations.

The license server instance then processes the request, reading the various identifiers, desired features, and custom data. If FlexNet Operations determines that the client requires a response, it generates a capability response. The response data contains current license rights available for the client. The capability response is then conveyed back to the client, which processes the response, after which the features in the response can be queried for the sake of detecting if a quota has been exceeded or for feature clipping.

Your licensing code specifies one or more desired features, which represent features desired in the capability request.

Your code also specifies an operation in the capability request, which indicates whether a response is expected. The “request” operation is used in feature-clipping scenarios, where a response is needed.