Watermarks appearing when using Metered license

Aspose.Total Product Family
1

Hi!

We are using a Metered license for our document conversion service which uses the Aspose Imaging, Cells, Pdf, Slides and Words libraries for Java.

Lately we’ve been having problems where we randomly get “Evaluation Only” watermarks in generated images and pdfs.

Our services have a piece of code that we run on startup, that sets up licenses and prints the consumption stats we can get from the different Metered classes. The Kotlin code is like this:

import com.aspose.cells.Metered as CellsMetered
import com.aspose.imaging.Metered as ImagingMetered
import com.aspose.pdf.Metered as PdfMetered
import com.aspose.slides.Metered as SlidesMetered
import com.aspose.words.Metered as WordsMetered

(...)

val cells = CellsMetered()
cells.setMeteredKey(meteredPublicKey, meteredPrivateKey)
log.info("Aspose Cells metered credits consumed = ${CellsMetered.getConsumptionCredit()}, data consumed = ${CellsMetered.getConsumptionQuantity()} MB")

val imaging = ImagingMetered()
imaging.setMeteredKey(meteredPublicKey, meteredPrivateKey)
log.info("Aspose Imaging metered credits consumed = ${ImagingMetered.getConsumptionCredit()}, data consumed = ${ImagingMetered.getConsumptionQuantity()} MB")

val pdf = PdfMetered()
pdf.setMeteredKey(meteredPublicKey, meteredPrivateKey)
log.info("Aspose Pdf metered credits consumed = ${PdfMetered.getConsumptionCredit()}, data consumed = ${PdfMetered.getConsumptionQuantity()} MB")

val slides = SlidesMetered()
slides.setMeteredKey(meteredPublicKey, meteredPrivateKey)
log.info("Aspose Slides metered credits consumed = ${SlidesMetered.getConsumptionCredit()}, data consumed = ${SlidesMetered.getConsumptionQuantity()} MB")

val words = WordsMetered()
words.setMeteredKey(meteredPublicKey, meteredPrivateKey)
log.info("Aspose Words metered credits consumed = ${WordsMetered.getConsumptionCredit()}, data consumed = ${WordsMetered.getConsumptionQuantity()} MB")

Recently, the output of the above code has been like below:

Aspose Cells metered credits consumed = 134.0, data consumed = 2789.35286 MB
Aspose Imaging metered credits consumed = 0, data consumed = 0 MB
Aspose Pdf metered credits consumed = 0, data consumed = 0 MB
Aspose Slides metered credits consumed = 134.0, data consumed = 2789.35286 MB
Aspose Words metered credits consumed = 134.00000, data consumed = 2789.35286 MB

Why would the numbers for Imaging and Pdf be zeroes? I don’t think it used to be like this, but I don’t know exactly when this started happening.

Does this look like it could be the reason for the watermarks sometimes showing up in the generated files? How would I go about debugging/fixing this?

2

@tommy.thorsen

Can you please share what version of the APIs are you using? About Aspose.PDF, have you tried using 23.11 version (an older one)? Because, there had been some issues related to the metering license in higher version of the API and they are going to be fixed in 24.6 version which will be released soon. About the Aspose.Slides, @andrey.potapov will be writing to you shortly.

3

For the Imaging and Pdf libraries, we are on 24.4. That is, I updated to 24.5 today, hoping that might fix the problem.

Are you saying the problem is not fixed in 24.5 either, but they will be fixed in 24.6?

4

@tommy.thorsen

The issue should be fixed in 24.5 version of Aspose.PDF API. Please confirm if you are still noticing it in the latest available version.

5

@tommy.thorsen,
To check the issue in Aspose.Slides, please follow these instructions and send us your license keys. Then we will check the problem on our end.

6

Nice! In that case the fixes are already deployed. I will let you know if the problem pops up again. Thanks!

7

Hi Andrey! It seems like the problems will be solved by upgrading to the latest version of the various libraries, so I’m going to try that first. If it turns out more debugging is needed, I might reach out to you again. Thanks!

8

@tommy.thorsen,
We will be waiting for your feedback. Thank you for using Aspose products.

9

@tommy.thorsen
Hello! We were able to reproduce the issue in Imaging, we will investigate it and provide you with the results as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

10

Thank you for looking into it, Nikita!

We had another report of watermarks being returned from our service today, despite all the packages being at the very latest version. The watermark was in an image generated by the Imaging package.

It was suggested by @asad.ali above that it might help to downgrade to earlier versions, so I have downgraded all Aspose packages to pre-v24 versions. This does fix the output from the Metered classes:

Aspose Cells metered credits consumed = 361.0, data consumed = 6218.23841 MB
Aspose Imaging metered credits consumed = 361.00000, data consumed = 6218.23841 MB
Aspose Pdf metered credits consumed = 361.0, data consumed = 6218.23841 MB
Aspose Slides metered credits consumed = 361.0, data consumed = 6218.23841 MB
Aspose Words metered credits consumed = 361.00000, data consumed = 6218.23841 MB
11

@tommy.thorsen
We have opened the following new ticket(s) in our internal issue tracking system and will deliver their fixes according to the terms mentioned in Free Support Policies.

Issue ID(s): IMAGINGNET-7235

You can obtain Paid Support Services if you need support on a priority basis, along with the direct access to our Paid Support management team.

1 Like
12

Thank you @Nikita_Romanov! I’m glad to see you made a ticket for this.

If I could also make a suggestion: The behavior where the Aspose libraries fall back to evaluation mode when there’s a problem with the license, is not great for us. Especially since there is (to my knowledge) no good way to detect that evaluation mode was used either.

For us, a hard fail would be better.

If the Aspose library would throw a LicenseException or something like that, instead of falling back to evaluation mode, it would let us handle the problem more gracefully. It would let us throw up some alerts and have someone come look at the problem immediately, instead of us silently returning broken pdfs/images to our users and relying on user complaints to detect the problem.

13

@tommy.thorsen

We will research and discuss with the team what can be done with your request. This can take some time.
Thanks for your patience.

1 Like
14

Hi, @tommy.thorsen
Could you inform me what type of metered license do you use?

15

I am not sure. What kinds of metered licenses are there, and how can I tell which type I use?

16

@tommy.thorsen
It could be
Metered for Aspose.Total
Metered for Aspose.Imaging
Metered for Aspose.PDF
and so on.
As I understood the line

imaging.setMeteredKey(meteredPublicKey, meteredPrivateKey)

does not throw an exception, correct?

17

I believe it is Metered for Aspose.Total.

The call to imaging.setMeteredKey does not throw an exception, correct.

1 Like
18

Thank you for the clarification. We are analyzing this issue, but unfortunately, we can not still reproduce it.