How to Use Documents Libraries on Offline Machines

Like most of our other products, you can use any of the Documents Solutions .NET libraries on a machine with no internet access. Our license model allows the application license key to be checked locally without an internet connection. 

Our Documents .NET libraries are distributed via NuGet package. With an internet connection, users can find the packages directly through Visual Studio via the NuGet Package Manager. If you intend to develop on a machine without internet access, you will not be able to do this. Instead, you can download the latest release of your desired library on a device with internet access, and then transfer the files over to the machine without internet. You would then add the NuGet packages to your project locally from your system rather than nuget.org, and we will briefly go through the steps on how to do this. 

For this example, we will download the DsPDF library, but the steps will be the same for any other product releases with NuGet packages included in their respective downloads. First, we will download the release on our machine with internet access, then transfer the downloaded archive to the machine without internet. We can then extract the archive and find the “nupkg” folder, which contains local copies of all NuGet packages that the library uses.

With a blank console app template open in Visual Studio, access the NuGet Package Manager by right-clicking the project name in the solution explorer and selecting “Manage NuGet Packages”. Then, click on the gear shown below:

In the next screen, click on the plus button to add a new package source. You can then name the package source and set the source path to the location of the “nupkg” folder, or whichever location the NuGet packages are present:

After updating the new source with the local source, we can now head back to the “Browse” tab of the NuGet Package Manager and select our new package source. Now, our local NuGet packages will be displayed and are ready to be added to the project.