The Automatic scenario consists of the following:

1. You distribute a unique Access Key to the End User from the pool of created access keys.
2. The end user enters the access key when the installation program prompts for it.
3. As an alternative to steps 1 and 2, an Access Key can be automatically obtained from the pool available for your application. In this case no input from the end user is required (i.e., call GetLicKeyAuto("")).
4. The Licensing Component is used to form a Hardware Key, obtain a License Key, and store it into the registry.
5. If an error occurs, the grace period is activated.

When using the Automatic Licensing Scenario, once you have added licensing calls to your application, as explained in the previous section (Adding Licensing Calls to Your Application), the only additional step you need to complete to license your product is to add calls to the Licensing Component. The Licensing Component facilitates the process of obtaining a License Key bound to the End user's system. This is typically done during the ImageGear-based solution installation, but you might want to consider providing a separate registration utility (or menu item in your application) if you are licensing manually or to handle errors that may occur during the installation.

Accessing the Licensing Component from the installer is typically done using a script that is executed during installation (Accusoft Corporation provides a sample VB Script). The Licensing Component allows you to implement two scenarios a an Automatic Licensing Scenario and a Manual Licensing Scenario. You can use either scenario to obtain a license for the end user's machine, although the automatic method is easier to use.

In The Automatic Scenario, you only need to call a single method (GetLicKeyAuto) of the Licensing Component that does the following things for you:

1. Obtains the Hardware Key from the End User system.
2. Sends a request to the licensing authority (either the Deployment Licensing Service or Deployment Proxy Service).
3. Stores the License Key into the registry on the end user's machine.

This is the preferred method since it requires very little manual intervention or no intervention at all, depending on whether or not you have decided to distribute individual access keys to end users explicitly.