CARTO Reader/Writer

FME provides read and write access to CARTO databases.

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

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

More information about the CARTO can be found at www.carto.com.

Note: CARTO was previously called CartoDB. For additional information, see CARTO's website.

CARTO Product and System Requirements

Format

Platform

Operating System

Reader/Writer

FME Desktop License

FME Server

FME Cloud

Windows 64-bit

Linux

Mac

Reader

Available in FME Professional Edition and higher

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Writer

Available in FME Professional Edition and higher

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Format Usage Notes

  • CARTO 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.

  • At the time of writing, CARTO 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 CARTO reader and writer do not expose the integer primary key column (carto_id) for CARTO tables as an attribute.
  • Reader: When getting the list of tables in a CARTO account, some “ghost” tables may be included. These “ghost” tables are tables that do not show up in the CARTO 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.
  • Writer: CARTO does not distinguish between line and multiple line geometries, nor does it distinguish between polygon and multiple polygon geometries. To improve consistency, FME will promote lines to multilines and polygons to multipolygons before writing to a CARTO table.

Reader Overview

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

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

Writer Overview

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

The CARTO writer uses the information within the FME workspace to automatically create CARTO 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.

Notes:

  • CARTO may take several minutes to register tables that have been newly created by FME.
  • To create tables in a CARTO Multiuser Enterprise account, a valid username must be entered in the Writer Parameters.

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.

FME Community

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