Introduction
============

This document aims at describing what cartodbfy is and what its formal requirements are, with the following goals in mind:

- clarify what are the expectations of the "cartodbfycation process".
- define an important part of what should be a stable, public API
- allow for better testing, which should in turn...
- ...ease modifications and increase quality of the code



What is the cartodbfycation
===========================

The cartodbfycation is the process of converting an arbitrary postgres table into a valid CartoDB table, and register it in the system so that it can be used in the CartoDB editor and platform to generate maps and analysis.



Valid CartoDB tables
====================

A valid CartoDB table shall meet the following conditions:

- Have a ``cartodb_id`` integer column as primary key with a sequence as default value
- Have a ``the_geom`` column of type ``Geometry`` with SRID 4326
- Have a ``the_geom_webmercator`` column of type ``Geometry`` with SRID 3857
- The columns ``the_geom`` and ``the_geom_webmercator`` shall be in sync

Additionally, a CartoDB table can contain other columns.



High level requirements
=======================

Here is a list of high level requirments for the public function ``CDB_CartodbfyTable()``:

- A call to ``CDB_CartodbfyTable()`` shall modify/rewrite the table and produce a valid CartoDB table with the same name.
- A call to ``CDB_CartodbfyTable()`` shall cause the registration of the table into the platform
- It shall be idempotent, meaning that successive calls to ``CDB_CartodbfyTable()`` shall not produce any visible effect in the system.
- If there's a column containing a geometry, it shall be used to generate ``the_geom`` and the ``the_geom_webmercator`` columns.
- Exporting and re-importing the same table in CartoDB shall produce equivalent tables, with the same features associated to the same ``cartodb_id``'s.

Note that there should be only one feature per row in the source table. If there's more than one, then which one is used for ``the_geom`` and ``the_geom_webmercator`` fields is not determined.



Low-level requirements
======================

- If the original table contains a valid (unique and not null) ``cartodb_id`` column, it shall be used
- If the original table contains a ``the_geom`` column or a ``the_geom_webmercator`` column in the expected projection (EPSG 4326 and EPSG 3857, respectively) they shall be used.
- A modification of a cartodbfy'ed table shall insert or update a row in ``CDB_TableMetadata``
- A cartodbfy'ed table shall have a ``btree`` index on ``cartodb_id``
- A cartodbfy'ed table shall have ``gist`` indices on ``the_geom`` and ``the_geom_webmercator``
- Cartodbfy shall deal with text columns for imports, regarding CartoDB columns