User Guides

User Guides are Markdown documentation generated for your model-driven apps, built deterministically from the crawled data. They describe the app's navigation and the components of the crawled solution that contains it, such as tables, automations and integrations. You generate a guide on demand from Solution Manager, and it is free.

What Are User Guides?

Model-driven apps often lack end-user documentation. Teams build apps, but nobody writes the manual. User Guides give you a start on this. They assemble the app's sitemap, plus the tables, forms, views and automations of the solution it belongs to, into a structured guide that explains how the app is put together.

The guide is built the same way component summaries are: from a deterministic template, not a language model. No AI service is called. The guide is assembled entirely from metadata already sitting in your own environment. The names, metadata and documentation of your components never leave your environment. Generating a guide does send VerseBlocks a usage report, which records that the feature ran and carries no guide text or component names. The privacy policy lists everything Cartographer sends.

The generated guide is written in Markdown and can be viewed directly in Cartographer or copied to a wiki.

How to Generate a User Guide

Guides are generated on demand, and no crawl or schedule creates one for you. Generating a guide needs Cartographer to be activated, the solution that contains the app to be crawled, and Create and Write rights on the User Guide table, which the Cartographer Admin role has.

  1. 1

    Navigate to Solution Manager

    Open the Cartographer app and go to Solution Manager.

  2. 2

    Find the User Guides section

    It lists every model-driven app found across all of your crawled solutions, one row per app.

  3. 3

    Click Generate Guide

    Click Generate Guide next to the app you want to document — or Regenerate if it already has one and you want to refresh it after changes.

  4. 4

    View the guide

    Once generation finishes, click View to open the guide in a formatted preview panel.

What's Included in a Guide

Every guide is built from the same nine sections, in order:

Overview

Counts of the tables, forms, views, automations, integrations, security roles and plugin assemblies the crawl captured in the whole solution

Navigation

The app's sitemap, walked area by area, group by group, down to each sub-area

Tables

The tables that the crawled solution's components belong to, each with its forms, views and business rules

Automations

Cloud flows, plugin steps, classic workflows, custom actions, business rules and business process flows in the crawled solution, grouped by table

Custom APIs

Each custom API's own call contract — bound or unbound, request parameters, and response properties

Integrations

The connectors the solution's flows use, plus its connection references, custom connectors and environment variables

Plugin Assemblies

The assemblies that ship with the solution and the plugin types each one contains

Security Roles

The security roles captured for the crawl configuration

Glossary

Table logical names and component unique names, for translating between what users see and what's underneath

Only the introductory description and Navigation are specific to the app. Everything else covers the whole crawled solution that contains it, so two apps in one solution share the same tables, automations and other lists. A section reports what the crawl actually captured — a count of zero for a given type means the crawl found none, not that the section was skipped.

Viewing and Copying

User Guides are stored in Markdown format and can be used in a couple of ways:

  • View in Cartographer — the guide renders in a formatted preview pane directly in the app
  • Copy Markdown — copy the raw Markdown to your clipboard and paste it into a wiki, a documentation site or any Markdown editor
A guide can't be downloaded as a file, and there is no Word, PDF or print option. Copy Markdown is the way to take a guide out of Cartographer.

Regenerating Guides

When your app changes — new forms, updated views, additional areas — you should regenerate the User Guide to keep it current. Find the app in the User Guides section of Solution Manager and click Regenerate. Cartographer rebuilds the guide from the latest crawl data and overwrites the previous version. A crawl, a schedule or Rebuild everything never refreshes a guide. Regenerate keeps no version history, so copy the Markdown first if you want to keep the old one.

We recommend regenerating guides after major solution updates, especially after adding new tables, forms, or sitemap areas to an app — and re-crawling the solution first, so the guide is built from current metadata.