FIXEDUNIQUE masking function for flat files

Products

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

Issue/Introduction

Requirement: Mask the firstname/lastname fields in a flat file, so that they look to be something like John{id(random number)}.

We tried to use the  FIXEDUNIQUE function for masking, but this function is not working we expected it should. When we pass the values in parameter1, it just replaces the empty values.

Environment

Release : TDM 4.10 and FDM 4.10

Cause

When using the FIXEDUNIQUE masking function with flat flies that do not use fixed width columns, the column size is considered as 0. The reason is FIXEDUNIQUE trims the values to fit into the column width, so with column width 0, it (always) returns empty string.

Resolution

Engineering has provided a fix in FatsDataMasker-4.10.531,0 or greater. The behavior was modified to ignore the column size when it's equal to zero. But in such case we can't expect the padding that normally occurs with FIXEDUNIQUE to happen. For example for column size = 3 it returns 001, 002, 099, 100. With column size = 0 it would simply return 1, 2, 99, 100 and so on.

The patch is available from download from the Test Data Manager (TDM) Support Patches page.