Step

Package steps are essential in monitoring package executions as they report information such as the start and end of package execution, errors and also handle execution abort.

They are also useful in organizing a package or skipping parts of the anonymization package if and when it is needed. While steps are useful when creating a package, their true value can only be seen when using the BizDataX Portal to monitor package executions.

Usage

A step is a crucial component in monitoring package executions, so every masking engine activities have to be nested inside a step activity or the package structure won't be valid. Further information on how to create a valid structure with package steps can be found here. They can also be used to control which parts of the package are executed in a particular run, and this is most often achieved using package parameters.

Example

Let's assume we have to mask two tables, Customer and Account. We want to control if we want to mask both or only one of these in a single execution, and we want to monitor the execution using the BizDataX Portal. We create two steps and rename them both to reflect the table whos masking they will monitor. In the Customer masking step we place a masking engine and define our algorithm for masking customers, and then we do the same for accounts in the Account masking step. We also create two parameters, one for each step, and set them as the value for the IsActive property of the steps so we can change their values on the Portal before each execution.

Figure 1: Using package steps

Properties