Will semantic-link-labs functionality be added to semantic-link in future?

[etgh1]

Greetings, all. I love the functionality that semantic-link-labs (SLL) introduces (especially when it comes to object migration/syncing in Fabric), but I have a question: will the "lab" features be vetted by Microsoft and built in to the "official" semantic-link package in future?

The reason I ask is I can't actually use SLL in a Production environment due to security concerns given the "labs" nature of SLL. It's like torture as I really need some of these capabilities, but compliance and information security considerations make us squeamish about using a library that Microsoft Security hasn't 100% vetted and backed.

[bo-zhou-ms]

Hi @etgh1,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing your thoughts! I’m a developer on the semantic-link product team, and we really appreciate your feedback.

We’ve recently been discussing plans to bring some of the most popular SLL capabilities into semantic-link. However, given limited resources, we need to prioritize which features to integrate based on actual usage and customer needs. That's why we are happy to hear your voices here! If you could share more about your specific scenarios and which SLL functions are critical for your daily workflows, we’d love to bring that into our planning discussions. This will help us evaluate whether we can include them in the next planning cycle.

Thanks!

[etgh1]

Thanks for the reply, and glad to hear it. Big one for my org would be functions pertaining to semantic model create/update/deploy and report rebinding. In terms of scenario/use case, we keep needing to deploy models to workspaces outside defined deployment pipeline paths for certain business reasons (e.g., business-unit workspaces store objects that need to be deployed to a central workspace for an org app), but there's no easy way to perform this in Fabric today. Creates a lot of manual steps and duplication of resources that isn't easily scriptable.

That's where I see SLL coming in handy. I experimented with SLL previously and found these helpful:

• deploy_semantic_model
• report.clone_report
• report.get_report_json
• report.update_report_from_reportjson

I'm sure there are others as one of the things I love about SLL is that it builds in support for tapping into many different APIs. Microsoft has a lot of lovely APIs, but it can be challenging to spin up infrastructure/manage principals to tap into those APIs, especially across workspaces/business units. SLL makes this way more convenient.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to test further due to the security considerations, which hurt me. Also not sure if TMSL introduces any changes on the JSON approach or not (I've been experimenting with using TMSL with existing semantic-link capabilities as a "workaround" to move objects to workspaces).

[bo-zhou-ms]

Thank you for sharing these! Your feedback is extremely valuable in helping us make semantic-link better. We’ll explore adding these migration-related functionalities in the upcoming 0.13.0 release. Additionally, we’re actively tracking other enhancements — such as Fabric REST wrappers — and plan to include them in future versions of semantic-link.