CATI: Online License Transaction Failed: Clearing Your Credentials

This blog post was originally published for CATI, now GoEngineer, under my old last name on December 5th, 2020. Since SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing is no longer available, the article now redirects to a blog post indicating as such. I have published the original article below as a record of my work, not as a reference for software problems.

SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing has been one of the great features of more recent releases (https://www.cati.com/blog/2018/04/solidworks-2018-admin-portal-online-licensing/) - being able to simply fire up a SOLIDWORKS session on any of your computers without having to remember to deactivate and reactivate licenses has been a godsend for many who do office, shop, and field work.

Life, though, often has other plans. Some of us have multiple SOLIDWORKS IDs and in converting to an online license we forget to log out of the mismatched account with no way to get back in. Sometimes, we get a new error message "Online License Transaction Failed, please check your internet connection."

What to do? There can be some musical-chairs-ing with the SOLIDWORKS CAD Admin Portal, but that's a little involved and may need another person to help out. Thankfully there is one easy step to remedy this kind of problem:

Close out of all instances of SOLIDWORKS and delete the file called "ud.xml" from the following directory: C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\SolidWorks\Credentials

Give your computer a reboot and that's it - that is where SOLIDWORKS stores your login credentials. At next startup, you'll be prompted to re-enter your credentials and you'll be able to get started.

If this doesn't do it, get in touch with us for technical support. We're available 12 hours a day by phone, chat, or email and happy to get you sorted out and back to modeling!

Mike Thompson

SOLIDWORKS Application Engineer