Removing Flex Data Visualization Watermark Flex 3 to Flash Builder 4
Ran across an interesting problem last night that had me almost tearing my hair out, so I though I’d share to save others the pain. I have a fully licensed version of both Flex 3 Professional and Flash Builder 4 Professional on my machine. When compiling an old Flex 3 project which uses the “Data Visualization” components it suddenly had this ugly watermark on it!
For those of you who don’t know, this is the watermark shown when you are using beta or trial versions of the IDE with the DV components. Anyway, I had to get rid of this stupid watermark so I decided to do some googling. I applied the fixes outlined in this article to flex-config.xml and license.properties but the watermark was still showing! It was driving me crazy, literally. You know what the problem was? Flash Builder 4. Take a look at the license.properties file (located in C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Flex on Win7 machines) and you will see that it contains license information for both Flex Builder 3 and for Flash Builder 4. In order to remove the watermark when compiling the DV components through Flex 3 on a machine with Flash Builder 4 also installed, you must edit the license.properties file and remove all references to Flash Builder 4.
After you have corrected the file, compile the app that uses the DV components [in Flex3] and voila! No watermark. Keep in mind that every time you launch Flash Builder 4 it will re-insert its license information into the license.properties file, thereby restoring the watermark in your future Flex 3 compilations unless you edit the license.properties file again. Hope this helps some people!
