Encrypt field
Description
If checked, data in the field is encrypted by Alpha Anywhere.
Discussion
The Encrypt field property specifies whether or not data in a field is encrypted. If checked, data is encrypted by Alpha Anywhere when written to the field and decrypted when read from the field.
Enabling Encrypt field exposes the Encryption key field. The Encryption key is used to encrypt and decrypt the values in the field. This key can be the same for all fields or unique for each field.
When Alpha Anywhere encrypts the data, it prepends the field data with the prefix ENCRYPTED:.
Field encryption is only supported for character fields.
The encrypted data is longer than the decrypted data. If the table field is not large enough to store the encrypted value, it will not be encrypted. Make sure your database schema specifies fields are large enough to hold the encrypted values.
Encryption key
The Encryption key can be defined at design-time, either in the List Builder or in the Project Properties, or at runtime using a session variable. For example:
session.myKey
If you define the key in Project Properties, set Encryption key to <Default>.
Searching Encrypted Fields
When searching an encrypted field, only exact match type searches are supported. For example, you cannot search using the >, >=, <, <=, contains, starts with, or ends with operators.
Videos
Encrypting Data in a SQL Table
You can use a List control with a Detail View to display data from a SQL table and to update the data in the table. You might want to encrypt certain fields in the SQL table.
In this video we show how you can encrypt the data in a field in a SQL table when updating the table from a List control with a detail view.
See Also