FDM Custom Masking Functions - Table Columns as Parameters
Article ID: 206189
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
I have been working with Custom Masking Functions for a while now, and using literal values as the parameters have been sufficient for a while.
A customer in Italy come to me with an issue that I was not able to solve using Custom Masking Functions. They mentioned that they have an Italian Tax Code that receives part of its information from the first name of a person, part comes from the last name, part comes from the birthdate, part comes from the gender, part comes from the birth city and finally they have a checksum.
They would like to get all the information from fields in the same table (in some situations, the fields are in different tables as well), retrieving the masked values for each field.
I noticed that the option to get the original value or the masked values are not part of the IMaskFunction interface exposed by FDM.
They were thinking of adding database functions to retrieve the values from those fields, but I mentioned to them that the CONCAT and the SQLFUNCTION functions allow us to retrieve values coming from table columns, and it could be possible to do it.
I asked in the Communities, and I was informed that this information is not still available in the exposed interface and that I would need to request it via Enhancement Request.
I suggested the customer create a SQL Server function to solve their issue and call it using the SQLFUNCTION in FDM, but they mentioned to me that it would be hard to maintain this function in multiple databases, and having a Java Custom Masking Function would be much easier.
I would like to ask for an Enhancement Request to include the possibility of using database columns in the custom function parameters.
Environment
Release : 4.9.1
Component : CA Test Data Manager - Fast Data Masker
Resolution
Note: TDMWeb-4.9.245.0 supports the use of custom masking functions from TDM Portal.
Feedback
