Billing cycle type overrides License Duration? Confused!

1. What does the billing cycle have to do with the license duration? Why are they interfering with each other?

The license duration is used when you're not using license billing, it is a one time thing.
If the license duration is 30 days, the license expires after 30 days and that's it, the end.
The billing cycle offers continuous periods (after 30 days the license doesn't expire, the customer gets recharged),

You didn't mention whether your 12-month cycle was prepaid or postpaid, but the behavior you're seeing looks correct.

What exactly are you attempting to accomplish? If you want your license to have a fixed duration, then what purpose will the recurring order serve?

The intention is that Commerce License Billing will "take over" the expiration management for a license. When you are just using Commerce License, you assign a fixed duration to your license. But if you are using CLB, you intend for your licenses to renew perpetually and charge the user on a recurring basis for that renewal. This is why CLB removes the license expiration date -- the recurring order and billing process is supposed to manage the license's status each billing cycle (year, month, whatever) based on whether the customer pays their bill or not.

If someone were to not pay their bill (most commonly this means if an order were to hit the dunning_past_due status in the Commerce Dunning cycle) you would use Rules to revoke the license at that point rather than relying on automatic expiration.

Let me know if this makes more sense.

We should probably add a #description to the License Duration via a form alter. But even with CLB active it is still possible to have a license product where no billing cycle type is selected, which would mean that it is a strict License-based product with no recurring billing. So we can't just remove the field from all products -- both need to be present. Adding a note to the Billing Cycle Type field saying that this will enable recurring billing and override the License Duration is probably best. I'll add some notes to the module's description page to make it explicit that this is the intention. Thanks!

I wish I would find this explanations EARLY, before I traced the code for two hours lol.
I was searching exactly why licenses doen't expire, while they shouldn't as this is exactly what I do not want.

I propose CLB should modify licenses View to overwrite expire field for licenses created for CLB. Can we do that?

Yes, it would be very helpful to document this better. Very confusing when I'm going through the initial process of understanding the module.

I wish I would find this explanations EARLY, before I traced the code for two hours lol.

OnkelTem, how about spending two days like myself trying to figure out what is what till hitting this page? :)

CLB should at least override the product form and remove the (now) meaningless license duration setting, no?

AdamGerthel, I fully support your suggestion.

But even with CLB active it is still possible to have a license product where no billing cycle type is selected, which would mean that it is a strict License-based product with no recurring billing. So we can't just remove the field from all products -- both need to be present.

Kazanir, you'd be right here if AdamGerthel was suggesting to remove the "License billing cycle type", however he is suggesting just the opposite - to remove the "License duration", which is by your own words:

The intention is that Commerce License Billing will "take over" the expiration management for a license. When you are just using Commerce License, you assign a fixed duration to your license. But if you are using CLB, you intend for your licenses to renew perpetually and charge the user on a recurring basis for that renewal. This is why CLB removes the license expiration date...

Ah finally found this! We need better docs!

I also found this very confusing (and it's taken me weeks to figure out why my recurring CLB orders weren't recurring after the first recurrence). The language of this definitely needs an update; I don't think I understand what it's actually supposed to mean to make a patch, however. The logic of all of this confuses me.

On another front, with this working the way it does (instead of the way I thought it did), I don't see how to handle showing the date when the current billing period ends to my users. I was using the expires field in my license plugin in order to set that date in the database for licenses, and then I could show that field to the user in the View for the license. The only way I'm seeing to do this now is to add yet another field to my license for the duration. Is there an easy way to get the "end of billing cycle" date in my license plugin so I can have that info available in the view for my users without having to add another field?

And, finally, when I change my products to have an "unlimited" license duration, will that solve the problem I'm currently having where none of those orders have recurred (some are two or three months out of date now, having only recurred once, with me gnashing my teeth trying to figure out why) and make them start recurring, or will all of those need to become new orders somehow in order to start recurring?

Thanks for clarifying this.
I couldn't figure out what was happening, but now I see what happens.

Kazanir, you'd be right here if AdamGerthel was suggesting to remove the "License billing cycle type", however he is suggesting just the opposite - to remove the "License duration", which is by your own words:

The reason we cannot remove either field is because it is possible for a site builder to want some products to be licenseable (with expiration) and others to be licenseable on a recurring basis (which makes the "license duration" field superfluous.)

I have added documentation to the CLB documentation page to make this clear. I will try to come back to this to patch the module to disable the "duration" field as soon as a billing cycle type is selected for a product.

If someone were to not pay their bill (most commonly this means if an order were to hit the dunning_past_due status in the Commerce Dunning cycle) you would use Rules to revoke the license at that point rather than relying on automatic expiration.

I wonder is it possible to change the license status on payment failure without Commerce Dunning module? Anyone could share such a Rule that changes license status on payment failure?

I could find only "Activates all licenses of the provided order" action in Rules and no any single action that would let revoking or cancelling licenses.