Summaries

Every component Cartographer discovers gets a plain-English summary — produced automatically as part of the crawl, from the metadata the crawl collected. No configuration, no AI service, and nothing leaves your environment.

What Is a Summary?

Every component in your Power Platform environment has metadata — the raw definition of what it is and how it behaves. A plugin step has an assembly name, message, stage, and filtering attributes. A custom API has request parameters and response properties. A security role grants a specific set of privileges at a specific scope.

Cartographer turns that metadata into a plain-English paragraph using a deterministic template for the component's type. The same inputs always produce the same summary — there is no model making a judgment call, so nothing needs to be reviewed for accuracy or re-checked for hallucination. Here are three real summaries, taken verbatim from a live environment:

Summary

"'Get Flow Run History' is a custom API action (vb_GetFlowRunHistory). It is unbound, so it is called on its own rather than against a record. It takes 2 request parameter(s): Count (String), WorkflowId (String). It returns 2 response properties: ResultJson (String), Success (Boolean)."

Summary

"'VB.Core.Plugins' is a plugin assembly (version 1.0.0.0). It contains 2 plugin type(s): ActivateFreePlugin, LicenseValidationPlugin. It runs in Sandbox isolation."

Summary

"'Cartographer Admin' is a security role scoped to the 'org709466e0' business unit. It grants access to 10 table(s), broadest on: vb_component (CRWDApAt, Organization), …"

How Summaries Are Generated

Summary generation happens automatically, as part of the crawl:

  1. 1

    Crawl

    Cartographer reads the component's full metadata from Dataverse — schema definitions, form XML, flow JSON, plugin registration details, and so on, depending on the component type.

  2. 2

    Template summary

    A deterministic template built for that component type turns the metadata into a plain-English paragraph. No prompt, no model, no external call.

  3. 3

    Storage

    The summary is stored on the component's record in Dataverse. It persists across sessions and does not need to be regenerated unless the component changes.

  4. 4

    Incremental refresh

    Because crawls are incremental, a component whose source hasn't changed since the last crawl keeps its existing summary — only components that actually changed get a new one.

No data is sent to any AI service, and no API key is needed. Summaries are built entirely from metadata that Cartographer already read out of your own environment, using logic that runs inside a Dataverse plugin.

Regenerating a Summary

Most of the time you never need to think about this — a crawl keeps every summary current on its own. If you want to refresh one anyway, two options are available:

  • Component Dashboard — open a component's detail panel and click Regenerate Summary to rebuild just that one.
  • Solution Manager — click Generate Summaries on a solution to fill in summaries for any of its components that don't have one yet.