Summaries

Every component Cartographer discovers gets a plain-English summary — produced automatically as part of the crawl, from the metadata the crawl collected. No generative AI is involved and no API key is needed. The names, metadata and documentation of your components never leave 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.

Since 1.2.0, summaries describe behavior as well as structure. A cloud flow summary gives its trigger and its steps, such as creating, updating or listing records, calling an action, sending an email or making an HTTP request. A JavaScript summary lists the functions it defines, the fields it reads and reacts to, the tables it queries or writes through the Web API, what it does on the form and any deprecated APIs it still uses. A form summary says which scripts run and when, for example "It runs VB.Activation.onSave from vb_/js/Activation when the form is saved."

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, and no language model writes any of it. Here are real summaries of components that ship with Cartographer, shown without the closing sentence that names the solution:

Summary

"'Cartographer - Scheduled Crawl Processor' is a Cloud Flow (Scheduled). It runs on a schedule, every 30 minutes. It uses the following connector(s): shared_commondataserviceforapps. It lists records in vb_crawlconfigurations, calls vb_StartCrawl. It has 3 steps in all."

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."

How much a summary says depends on the component type. Cloud flows, JavaScript, forms, plugin steps and custom APIs get detailed summaries. Business rules, classic workflows, custom actions and business process flows are described by the table they apply to, without their conditions or actions. Charts, dashboards, desktop flows, canvas apps, custom pages and custom connectors get one line. JavaScript detection looks for literal Xrm calls, so a call built in another way is not listed.

You can read a summary in the Component Dashboard, in the Summary column or in a component's detail panel under the heading "Summary (Template)". Summaries also appear in the Solution Report, in exports and in user guides.

Search reads them too. Each component's name and summary go into the search index, so a question like "who is allowed to read records" finds the security roles. Search can only find what a summary says. The ranking comes from a small open-source embedding model bundled in the solution. It runs in your environment, makes no network calls and writes no text. Semantic Search explains how to use it.

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 language model writes it, and the summary is never sent anywhere.

  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. The names, metadata and documentation of your components never leave your environment. The activation details and usage reports that Cartographer does send to VerseBlocks are listed in the privacy policy.

Regenerating a Summary

A summary is rewritten whenever a crawl finds that its component changed. Once scheduled crawling is set up, each solution that isn't set to Manual Only is crawled on the frequency you chose for it, and you can run a crawl at any time from Solution Manager in two ways:

  • Crawl Now on a solution re-reads it and writes a new summary for each component that changed. Components that haven't changed keep their summary. Rebuild search index, in the More actions menu, brings search up to date with changed summaries.
  • Rebuild everything, in the More actions menu on a solution, re-reads every component whether or not it changed and writes every summary again. Use it after upgrading Cartographer so existing components pick up improved summary wording. It also re-indexes the components for search and does not regenerate user guides.