CartoDB Reader/Writer

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Professional Edition.

Overview

FME provides read and write access to CartoDB databases. CartoDB databases may contain tables. FME treats these tables as feature types, and can read features from them, as well as write features to them. FME treats each column in a table as an attribute, and each row as a feature.

CartoDB is a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud computing platform that provides GIS and web mapping tools for display in a web browser. CartoDB is open source, so users can either make use of the CartoDB web platform, or they can deploy their own instance of the software.

CartoDB is based on PostgreSQL and PostGIS as an underlying database.

More information about the CartoDB can be found at www.cartodb.com.

Format Usage Notes

• At the time of writing, CartoDB does not fully support the creation of tables through their SQL API. However, there exists a workaround, which is described in the Writer Overview below.
• The CartoDB reader and writer do not expose the integer primary key column (cartodb_id) for CartoDB tables as an attribute.
• Reader: When getting the list of tables in a CartoDB account, some “ghost” tables may be included. These “ghost” tables are tables that do not show up in the CartoDB tables dashboard. They can be read to and written from, just as any other table, but doing so will not cause them to appear in the tables dashboard.

Reader Overview

The CartoDB reader supports reading multiple tables from the same CartoDB account. Because of this, a separate reader must be created for each CartoDB account.

The tables must be defined in the workspace before they can be read.

Writer Overview

The CartoDB writer module stores attribute records into a Table associated with a CartoDB account. The CartoDB writer provides the following capabilities:

Table Creation

The CartoDB writer uses the information within the FME workspace to automatically create CartoDB Tables as required. All tables will be created when the first input feature is processed. If no features are sent to a feature type, then the corresponding table will not be created.

Note: At the time of writing, CartoDB does not fully support creation of tables through their SQL API. Because of this, tables created by FME may not show up in the CartoDB Tables Dashboard. To work around this, please follow these steps:

1. Create a new CartoDB table with FME.
2. Create an empty table in the CartoDB Tables Dashboard.
3. Rename the empty table to match the name of the table created with FME.

Upon completion of these steps, the data written with FME should appear, and the table will remain in the CartoDB Tables Dashboard.

Table Overwrite

If the Table Handling Format Parameter for a feature type is set to Drop and Create, then the writer will drop and re-create the table before writing any features to it.

Tables will be overwritten when the first input feature is processed. If no features are sent to a feature type, then the corresponding table will not be overwritten.

Format Resources

CartoDB Quick Facts

CartoDB Reader Parameters

CartoDB Writer Parameters

Feature Representation

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