API Changes, Headless Mode, and Side-by-Side Install
Important for API users. Please read carefully.
Despite Side-by-Side installation mode becoming active only as of v26, the changes to make it possible are in v25. A side effect of this is those with API applications and add-ons may need to make some changes or take additional actions.
Uninstalling Any of the Side-By-Side Versions Installed
Going forward, even though multiple versions of Alibre products can be present on one computer, API programs can target only one of the installed versions. The API programs locate the version to target using Windows registry entries. If a version is subsequently uninstalled, these registry entries can get removed and cause add-ons and API programs to fail subsequently.
To restore the registry entries in question, the workaround is to run any currently installed version of Alibre products As Administrator; by the time the Home Window is displayed, the required registry entries would have been restored. This is a one-time action and it is strongly recommended that this be done every time after uninstallation of side-by-side version of Alibre product.
Headless (GUI-less) Mode
Alibre installers deliver several unmanaged (COM) DLLs that are needed by the product during runtime. Up until version 24, the installer used to register these COM interfaces in the Windows system registry. However, in order to support side-by-side, v25 and future installers will no longer do this; instead, these COM DLLs are made visible to each side-by-side version using the application manifest.
The registration-free COM described above will fail to support 3rd party applications that invoke Alibre products in GUI-less mode. In order to support this use case, a BAT file has been packaged with the installer in v25. You must manually run this BAT file to manually register the COM DLLs by going to the Alibre installation folder and right click on the RegisterCOMDLLS.BAT file and run as administrator. This will register the COM DLLs.
Uninstalling any installed version would remove the COM registration from the registry. You must re-run the BAT file to re-register the COM DLLs. This step will be in addition to running AD as Administrator described in the section under “Uninstalling Any of the Side-by-Side Versions Installed”.
Please reference the addition to the Alibre API help document shown below: