Protegrity Standard Attribute

Protegrity Standard Attribute

The Protegrity Standard Attribute is the most direct way to instruct the Browser Protector to unprotect a specific element on any web page. When an HTML element is annotated with the data-pty-dataelement attribute.

This approach is intended for use when the web application itself can be instrumented — for example, when the application’s front-end templates or server-rendered HTML can be modified to include Protegrity markup.

How It Works

Add the data-pty-dataelement attribute to any HTML element that contains a protected value. Set the attribute’s value to the name of the Protegrity data element that was used to protect the data.

<span data-pty-dataelement="SSN">***-**-1234</span>

When the extension runs (either on page load or on DOM change), it scans the page for all elements carrying this attribute and submits each element’s text content to the Protegrity service for unprotection using the specified data element. The element’s text content is then replaced in-place with the plaintext result.

Processing Behavior

• The attribute value matching against configured data elements is case-insensitive.
• Elements that have already been processed are marked with a data-pty-processed attribute to prevent duplicate API calls.
• Elements with an empty data-pty-dataelement value or no text content are skipped.
• If the attribute value does not match any data element configured in the extension, the element is skipped with a warning logged to the browser console.
• When Unprotect Automatically is enabled, the extension also monitors the DOM for newly added elements carrying this attribute (e.g. content loaded dynamically after page load).

Priority

Standard attribute processing runs first, before custom mapping rules. This means any element tagged with data-pty-dataelement will always be processed by the standard attribute path, regardless of whether a custom mapping also matches it.

Example

Given the following rendered HTML:

<td data-pty-dataelement="FullName">John Doe token here</td>
<td data-pty-dataelement="SSN">***-**-6789</td>

The extension will submit both elements to the unprotection service — one using the FullName data element and one using SSN — and replace their contents with the corresponding plaintext values.