Configuration

There is not much to configure — Cartographer is free with every feature unlimited, so this page covers what genuinely exists: activation, crawl configurations and their schedules, and which security role a user needs. Activation and crawl configurations live inside the Cartographer app. Scheduled crawling and user access need a little setup outside it, and both are covered below.

Activation

Cartographer is completely free — there are no tiers, no trial, and nothing to buy. Activation asks for your name, company and email address and registers a free licence with VerseBlocks. VerseBlocks uses those details to know who uses Cartographer and to contact you about a breaking change or a security issue, and occasionally to ask what you think. It does not sell them. Most actions need activation first, including crawling, export, user guides and Best Practices. You can open the pages before you activate. After activation, Cartographer keeps working if VerseBlocks cannot be reached.

1Open the Cartographer app and navigate to Activation in the sidebar
2Enter your name, company name, and email address
3Click Activate

That is the entire flow. There is no license key to type in — a licence key exists behind the scenes, but it is never shown to you and you never need it. Activating needs Create and Write on the Configuration table, which the Cartographer Admin role has.

Activating sends your name, company, email address, organisation ID and environment URL to VerseBlocks. Cartographer then sends usage reports that say which feature ran or page was opened and, for a crawl, the display name of the solution. There is no switch to turn the reports off. The names, metadata and documentation of your components never leave your environment. The privacy policy has the full list.

The step-by-step walkthrough for activating right after install lives in the Installation guide. For more on what activation does and why it exists, see Activation.

Crawl Configurations

A crawl configuration names one solution to crawl. Create one from Solution Manager. At the foot of Configured Solutions, pick the Dataverse solution and a frequency, then click Add Solution. Adding a solution does not crawl it, so click Crawl Now on its row for the first crawl. The frequency is set when you add the solution and cannot be changed from the page afterwards.

Frequency	Behavior
Manual Only	Never crawls on its own — only when you click Crawl Now
Hourly	Crawls at most once per hour
Every 6 Hours	Crawls at most every 6 hours
Daily	Crawls at most once per day (the default)
Weekly	Crawls at most once per week

A normal crawl is incremental: a component whose source has not changed since the last crawl is skipped, not rewritten. A re-crawl of an untouched solution reports zero created, zero updated, and everything skipped, and takes seconds for a solution of tens of components. Each run is recorded in a crawl log with counts of created, updated, skipped, and removed components — a component that has disappeared from the solution is marked Removed rather than deleted.

Solution Manager shows the latest run under each solution as Last crawl breakdown. The More actions menu on each solution has Rebuild everything, which re-reads and rewrites every component. Run it after you upgrade Cartographer, because a normal crawl leaves unchanged components alone. See Upgrading Cartographer. The same menu has Remove solution, which deletes the Cartographer data for that solution after you type DELETE and cannot be undone. The solution itself stays in your environment untouched.

A frequency here only takes effect once the two Cartographer cloud flows are turned on and the connection reference is bound — a one-time setup step covered in Enable Scheduled Crawling. Until then, a schedule is accepted but does not run. After you activate, the Activation page shows whether the connection reference is bound and both flows are on, and Crawl Now works either way.

Once both are done, the Scheduled Crawl Processor flow checks every 30 minutes and crawls each solution that is due, based on its frequency and its last completed crawl. A scheduled crawl updates the documentation but does not build the search index. To make new components searchable, click Crawl Now in Solution Manager and keep the page open while it runs. See Semantic Search.

Security Roles

Two security roles ship with the solution. System Administrator and System Customizer have access by default. For anyone else, assign Cartographer Admin or Cartographer Reader, then add that role to the app: in make.powerapps.com, open Apps, select Cartographer, choose Share, and add the role. Until you do, the app does not appear for them. Every Cartographer action runs as the signed-in user. The Cartographer roles cover only the Cartographer tables, and a crawl also reads platform tables such as solutions, flows, plug-ins and forms, so a System Administrator or System Customizer installs, activates and runs crawls. Scheduled crawls run as the owner of the Dataverse connection the connection reference is bound to, who needs the same rights.

Cartographer Admin

Create, Read, Write, Delete, Append and Append To on all seven Cartographer tables, at organization scope, plus the privilege to open the app. It is needed to activate Cartographer, generate user guides and diagrams, run Best Practices and mark issues resolved.

Cartographer Reader

Read and Append To on the same seven tables, plus the privilege to open the app. Readers can browse everything Cartographer has already discovered, search, run the Report and export.

Next Steps

With Cartographer activated and a crawl configuration in place, you are ready to start crawling solutions.

Crawling Solutions Summaries Semantic Search