How to prevent FormatEncrypt from generating excluded values during obfuscation

Products

• CA Test Data Manager (Data Finder / Grid Tools)

Issue/Introduction

We have a scenario, where we are using FORMATENCRYPT to obfuscate SSNs.  We are using a WHERE statement in our MAPCSV to exclude obfuscating 25 SSNs.  However, a question came up, if we have a SSN that gets obfuscated using FORMATENCRYPT into one of the excluded SSNs, that would cause a problem, as there would be duplicate entries.  Is there a way to not allow an SSN to get convert to an SSN that has been excluded by the WHERE statement?

Environment

Release : 4.10

Resolution

The suggestion is to run another masking job with the where condition to include the excluded SSNs and use FORMATENCRYPT function. This way if the 1st FORMATENCRYPT generates an excluded SSN they can be masked by the 2nd job.

If the where condition is set correctly, running the second job will retain the original excluded SSNs, and only obfuscate the newly created ones.

With that said, simply running the job a second time will guarantee uniqueness.