[web2py] auth_user manually insert/update the password

[Bob]

Hello, could someone answer a couple of questions:

1. Is it possible to manually crypt the password in the same way that
crud() does it?
The reason is that I need to manually update the user with
db().update() and can't use crud

2. In similar situation using SQLFORM. When updating the user it's
logical to leave the password blank in case you don't want to change
it. But SQLFORM crypts the blank and changes the password in the DB

Any ideas?

Thanks