CARTO is a hosted platform that provides powerful yet intuitive SQL and mapping tools for visualizing, querying, and analyzing location-based data. CARTO Synced Tables functionality allows you to simply provide a link to your CSV, GeoJSON, or KML data feed, which is used to update your CARTO table on a regular basis.

By pairing Fulcrum with CARTO, you can combine best in class technology for field data collection with the ultimate platform for data mapping and analysis, all without having to write a single line of code.

This guide assumes you’ve read the Data Shares Introduction and are familiar with how Fulcrum Data Shares work.

Your plan must support data shares and your user account needs to have with the right role/permission to set up data shares.

Once you’ve configured your Fulcrum app and collected some data, you can enable data shares for the app you wish to sync with CARTO. Enabling Data Shares will generate read-only URLs for accessing data in your Fulcrum account without requiring authentication. Data shares provide a real-time data feed in formats such as CSV, GeoJSON, and KML, which are useful for publishing data to 3rd party services such as CARTO.

To create your Fulcrum Synced Table in CARTO, simply copy the URL to the GeoJSON Data Share from the App Dashboard. If your app utilizes repeatable fields, you’ll want to repeat the process below for each child table you want sync'd to CARTO.

Switch over to your CARTO account and on the Datasets page, click the green New Dataset button to launch the dataset connection screen. Paste the Fulcrum Data Share URL you copied above into the URL input and click the Submit button to proceed.

Finally, set the CARTO sync interval. At every interval, CARTO will fetch the latest data snapshot from your Fulcrum account and update the table in your CARTO account.

Note that the shortest available interval is one hour. If you need real-time syncing with Fulcrum, or you are dealing with a massive dataset, you will want to look into syncing via Fulcrum Webhooks rather than Data Shares.

Once your synced tables are set up in CARTO, you can proceed with collecting data via Fulcrum and building maps, queries, and visualizations in CARTO. Any Fulcrum media attachments will be available via URL fields, which can be used to build hyperlinks or image embeds. You can join child tables to their parent tables for additional analysis or build sophisticated applications utilizing the CARTO SQL and Maps APIs.