Testing Message Elements for Empty?

[rvarno]

OK, I am attempting to De-Identify Messages for testing purposes. So any sensitive msg elements (ei: PID.3.1) need to be changed to fictional data.
So what is the easiest way to accomplish this ? It doesn't look like the Message Builder "String Replacement" will work . . . so what J-Script code will do this.

If PID.3.1 is NOT equal to BLANKS then fill with "XXXXXXXX"
where "XXXXXXXX" is anything I want it to be.

[mourisj]

I would create a variable containing a number on the globalMap (for example called anon)
Then, for every message going through my channel, i'd set PID.3.1 with "ANON" + anon, and increment anon before going to the next message.
To make it nicer, you could even left-pad the variable up to the number of positions you need.
This would give you contents like ANON00001, ANON00002 etc. in you PID.3.1

[narupley]

Basically, it would go something like this:

if (msg.PID['PID.3']['PID.3.1'].toString())
	msg.PID['PID.3']['PID.3.1'] = 'XXXXXXXX';

Or, another way to do it is to create an outbound template with all of your dummy info, and then only map into tmp the fields that you wish to overwrite.