Salesforce: Hey, Do You Know?: Is it possible to use Encrypted Fields with Formula Fields?

The short answer is, YES.

But, it’s always nice to have more details. So, let’s get to it.

Salesforce Shield protects your enterprise with point-and-click tools that enhance trust, transparency, compliance, and governance across all of your business-critical apps. Salesforce Shield consists of 3 products:

Shield Platform Encryption gives your data a whole new layer of security while preserving critical platform functionality. It enables you to encrypt sensitive data at rest, and not just when transmitted over a network, so your company can confidently comply with privacy policies, regulatory requirements, and contractual obligations for handling private data.

Platform Encryption is evolving over time to include many use cases. One of the use cases is, to be able to use Encrypted Field with Formula Fields.

As of now, this feature is not available. Lack of this feature results in many workarounds of reduced functionality. For example: if we decide to encrypt a field then we can’t use that field in formulas, or if want to use it in formulas then…..well, you get it.

Spring’17 brings with it a new beta feature. This will allow users to use encrypted fields with formula fields. More information this feature is at https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring17/release-notes/rn_security_pe_formulas.htm.

“You can use several operations and functions, including concatenate (& and +), isBlank, isNull, if, hyperlink, and image. You can reference Quick Actions, and render encrypted data in text, date, and date/time formats. What’s more, your formulas can reference an unlimited number of encrypted fields, giving you even more of the data you’re looking for.”

Keep in mind that this is a “Beta” feature. It means that there might be some known limitations. For example, at the time of this blog, this feature doesn’t work if you want to use LEN in your formula.

To enable this feature, you can log a case with salesforce. It seems likely that this might be a GA feature in Summer’17. But as always, Salesforce’s “safe harbour” rule applies here.

Well, what are you waiting for? if you need it then go ahead and log a case.

And remember,………have fun!!

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