Method Community

I am a new user to Method and I am having trouble importing my contacts. I am getting the following error message:

jnairn -

First, I edited your post.  We don't want that number in a public forum :).

Now, the reason you are seeing that is because of the type of field you chose.  An integer is too small to hold that value as a number (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_overflow if you are interested).

You'd be better off just making the number a text field.  So just delete the field and recreate it.  Give it a size of 255 characters just to make sure it can handle my next point...

Finally, best practice is to encrypt any sensitive data that you are going to store raw credit card numbers in Method.  If you are going to be storing sensitive data, you should loop though your data and update it using the encrypt action to make it unreadable, and then right before using it run the decrypt action to make it readable again.

Paul 

Thanks for the response and for the "heads up". But I had already edited the number, it wasn't a "real" number. I'm smarter than that :).

I will give this a try and let you know if it works. Thank you!!!

Can you explain how to encrypt and decrypt data in method, please?

Hi there,

In Method there is an action Encrypt/Decrypt Field/Object. This action allows you to either encrypts the value so that it is unreadable, or decrypts a previously encrypted value to be readable again. If the encryption/decryption fails, the original value will be returned.

I believe what Paul was suggesting was to use the Start Loop Through Table action and the Encrypt action to go through all existing records you need to encrypt first and then decrypt each of them individually as they are needed or used.

Hope this helps.

Thank you. Where do I locate these actions?

Oh wow! You're missing all the best parts of Method. I'm going to provide you with two links.

1. Community Webinars. Scroll down to the section on 'Customization and find 'Introduction to Actions - Level 1'

2. Method Help Center where you'll also find references to our Actions & Objects.