Crawling Solutions

What Crawling Does

When you crawl a solution, Cartographer queries the Dataverse metadata APIs to discover every component that belongs to that solution. It reads the raw metadata for each component — table definitions, column schemas, form XML, view FetchXML, plugin step registrations, cloud flow definitions, and more — and stores a normalized record in the Component table.

Crawling is solution-scoped, meaning you choose exactly which solutions to crawl. This is not a full-environment blast — you control which solutions are documented and which are ignored.

Adding a Solution to Crawl

1. 1

   Open Solution Manager

   In the Cartographer app, navigate to Solution Manager in the left sidebar.

2. 2

   Click Add Solution

   Click the Add Solution button in the command bar. A panel will appear with a dropdown of all solutions in your environment.

3. 3

   Select a solution

   Choose the solution you want to crawl from the dropdown. You can search by solution name. Only managed and unmanaged solutions are shown — default solutions (like the Common Data Service Default Solution) are excluded.

4. 4

   Configure crawl settings

   Optionally configure the crawl frequency (manual, daily, weekly) and any component type filters. By default, all component types are included.

5. 5

   Save and Crawl

   Click Save to add the solution. Then click Crawl Now to start the initial crawl. The progress indicator will show how many components are being discovered.

Component Types Discovered

Cartographer discovers and catalogs 33 distinct component types. Each type is processed differently to extract the most useful metadata.

Crawl Frequency

You can configure how often Cartographer re-crawls each solution to keep documentation up to date.

Component Limits by Plan

The total number of components you can crawl depends on your plan tier. This is a total across all crawled solutions combined.

Re-crawling and Removing Solutions

Re-crawling

Click Crawl Now on any solution to trigger an immediate re-crawl. Incremental crawling means only changed components are reprocessed. Use Full Re-crawl if you want to discard all cached data and start fresh.

Removing a solution

To stop crawling a solution, select it in Solution Manager and click Remove. This deletes the crawl configuration and all associated component records from the Cartographer database. It does not affect the actual solution in your environment.

Crawl Log

Every crawl operation is recorded in the Crawl Log. You can view it from the Solution Manager to see:

• Start and end timestamps
• Number of components discovered, updated, and removed
• Crawl duration
• Any errors or warnings encountered
• Whether the crawl was manual or scheduled