Summary
Today, Workspace Relations (the Base / Branch links that visually connect workspaces) can only be created when every workspace is connected to the same Git repository.
Teams that manage their environments through a deployment pipeline like Azure DevOps releases + fabric-cicd cannot use this feature.
The ask: decouple workspace relations from Git integration so that any workspace can be linked to a base workspace, regardless of how it is deployed.
The problem
A common enterprise setup looks like this:
- Dev workspace is connected to Git (developers branch, commit, PR).
- Int / UAT / Prod are not connected to Git. They are populated by an automated pipeline (Azure DevOps + fabric-cicd) that deploys the items environment by environment.
This is a supported, Microsoft-recommended ALM pattern. Yet there is no way to express "these four workspaces are the same solution across environments" in the Fabric UI.
The result: in a tenant with dozens of workspaces, the Dev / Int / UAT / Prod instances of the same product sit scattered in a flat, alphabetical list with no visual connection between them.
What we'd like
Allow a workspace relation to be created between workspaces independently of Git connection state. Deployment tooling such as fabric-cicd could then register the relation as part of the release process.
Why this matters
Navigation & UI clarity. Group all workspaces of one solution together, so the environment topology is obvious at a glance instead of hunting through an alphabetical list of unrelated workspaces.
Example
A single solution spread across four environment workspaces:
- My Solution - Dev (Git-connected)
- My Solution - Int, base: My Solution - Prod
- My Solution - UAT, base: My Solution - Prod
- My Solution - Prod (base)
We want these workspaces to appear as one connected group in the Fabric UI (exactly like Git-branched workspaces do today).
Impact
- Unblocks workspace relations for every team using deployment-based ALM.
- Makes large multi-environment tenants dramatically easier to navigate, govern, and onboard into.
Technical note
The current API is POST /v1/workspaces/{id}/git/workspaceRelations. It rejects any workspace that isn't Git-connected with WorkspaceNotConnectedToGit, and requires all related workspaces to share the same Git repository root (WorkspaceRelationRootDirectoryMismatch). This idea asks to lift those two Git preconditions when the relation is created explicitly (UI action or API), so that deployment-driven environments qualify too.
References
- Workspace Relations API (overview): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/fabric/core/workspace-relations
- Fabric Git integration (workspace connection): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/fabric/core/git
- fabric-cicd (deployment tooling): https://microsoft.github.io/fabric-cicd/
