Setting Up Your Telerik Reporting License Key

Starting with the Q1 2025 release, Telerik Reporting requires activation through a license key (trial or commercial). This article describes how to download or update your personal license key and use it to activate the Telerik Reporting product.

An invalid license results in errors and warnings during build and run-time indicators such as watermarks and banners.

The implementation of the 2025 licensing requirements will occur in two phases:

• Phase 1 - Starting with the 2025 Q1 release, a missing or invalid license causes warnings during build and trial messages in the generated report documents. The trial distributions won't show the trial message when activated with a trial license. The commercial distributions of the product do not exhibit any functional restrictions.
• Phase 2 - Starting with the 2025 Q2 release, there will be only one product distribution with different licenses. A missing or invalid license will result in build errors and run-time indicators, such as watermarks.

Note that future updates of the product may restrict or disable some features when no valid license is present. You can send us feedback through the Contact Us form or by opening a support ticket.

Licensing Dependencies

Your projects have to reference the package Telerik.Licensing. We recommend using the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio. It automatically adds all the required code to your project files.

We recommend using Telerik Reporting NuGet packages in your projects rather than direct assembly references. The main reason is that the packages automatically add all dependencies, whereas when using references, you need to add them manually. The Telerik.Licensing package will be added automatically as a dependency for the Telerik.Reporting package.

Here are the changes the Visual Studio NuGet Package Manager will make, depending on the project type:

The older .NET Framework project types

• Add package reference to the packages.config file:

  <package id="Telerik.Licensing" version="1.*" targetFramework="net4*" />
  

• Update the cproj file with the DLL reference:

  <Reference Include="Telerik.Licensing, Version=1.*, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=*, processorArchitecture=MSIL">
      <HintPath>..\..\packages\Telerik.Licensing\lib\net4*\Telerik.Licensing.dll</HintPath>
  </Reference>
  

.NET project types

Update the cproj file like below:

<PackageReference Include="Telerik.Licensing" Version="1.*" />

We strongly recommend adding the above package for licensing. If adding the package is not an option in your scenario, you may add a License Key without NuGet References.

Downloading the License Key

To download a license key for Telerik Reporting, you must have either a developer license or a trial license.

The Progress Control Panel will automatically download and store your license key in your home directory. This makes it available for all projects you develop on your local machine.

You may automatically download and store your license key in your home directory also from the Visual Studio Extensions of Telerik Reporting:

To download manually a license key for Telerik Reporting, you must follow the steps below:

1. (optional) If you are new, you can sign up for a free trial first.
2. Go to the License Keys page in your Telerik account.

3. Click the Download License Key button.

   

Activating Telerik Reporting

To activate Telerik Reporting:

• Copy the downloaded telerik-license.txt license key file to your home directory. This makes the license key available to all projects that you develop on your computer.

  • For Windows: %AppData%\Telerik\telerik-license.txt
  • For Mac/Linux: ~/.telerik/telerik-license.txt

• Alternatively, copy the telerik-license.txt license key file to the root folder of your project. This makes the license key available only to this project. Do not commit the file to source control as this is your personal license key.

When you build the project, the Telerik.Licensing NuGet package automatically locates the license file and uses it to activate Telerik Reporting.

If your project doesn’t use NuGet packages, see Adding a License Key to Projects without NuGet References.

Adding a License Key to Projects without NuGet References

Telerik strongly recommends the use of NuGet packages whenever possible. Only include the license key as a code snippet when NuGet packages are not an option.

If you cannot use NuGet packages in your project, add the license as a code snippet:

1. Go to the License Keys page in your Telerik account.

2. On the Telerik Reporting row, click the View key link in the SCRIPT KEY column.

   

3. Copy the C# code snippet into a new file, for example, TelerikLicense.cs.

4. Add the TelerikLicense.cs file to your project.

Do not publish the license key code snippet in publicly accessible repositories. This is your personal license key.

Updating Your License Key

Whenever you purchase a new license or renew an existing one, always download and install a new license key. The new license key includes information about all previous license purchases. This process is referred to as a license key update. Once you have the new license key, use it to activate Telerik Report.

See Also

• License Activation Errors and Warnings
• Adding the License Key to CI Services)
• Frequently Asked Questions about Your Telerik Reporting License Key