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Locating "General Instructions" in Dataverse

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Posted on by Jelle de Haas

Hello Community,

I am working on a solution to automate the testing and optimization of my Copilot Studio agents. My goal is to build a workflow that programmatically retrieves the bot's "General Instructions," uses a LLM to suggest improvements, and then updates them.

To do this, I first need to reliably locate and read the main "General Instructions" from the underlying Dataverse tables.

Based on my research, I expected to find these instructions within the botcomponent table. I have performed the following steps:

Located the correct bot in the bot table to get its botid.
Queried the botcomponent table, filtering for records matching the _parentbotid_value and, specifically, looking for a record with componenttype = 18 (which I believe corresponds to "Copilot Settings").

Despite this, I am unable to find a record that clearly contains the main bot instructions in its content column. I've inspected several component types but haven't found the right one.

Could someone please confirm if this is the correct method? Any guidance on the correct table, column, and filters to use would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,047 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Jelle de Haas

So I went looking for it myself and couldn't find them yet. I found an Actual instructions column, but the preview data didn't show it. so its possible I just need to read the entire data from an App to see it all, I didn't try that yet, I was just in the Edit Table view.

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Jelle de Haas 42 on at

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Hi @Michael E. Gernaey,

Thank you for taking the time to look into this! I really appreciate the effort.

You mentioned you found an actual "instructions" column. That's a very promising lead!

Could you please let me know in which Dataverse table you found that specific column? I'd be happy to try and read the full data from a flow to see if the content is accessible there.

Thanks again for your help!

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,047 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Its weird @Jelle de Haas

I searched and didn't find my actual content, but I believe it is embedded in one of the fields, just that the data preview, doesn't show it. I am certain. As it has to be in one of them.

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,047 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Jelle de Haas

Did you ever find it?

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Jelle de Haas 42 on at

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Hi @Michael E. Gernaey,

Yes, figured it out after some digging. The instructions for a Copilot are stored in the botcomponent table (display name: Copilot component).

Table: botcomponent (Copilot component)

Row: Look for the one where the componenttype is 'Custom GPT'.

Column: The instructions are inside the column named data (its display name is "Obi Data").

Just a heads-up: the content is in "OBI format" and you can't access or modify it directly with Power Automate, unfortunately.

However, you can find the raw data within an exported solution. After unzipping the file, navigate to the botcomponents folder and look for a subfolder whose name ends with .gpt.default. The instructions are in the data file inside that folder.

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,047 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Jelle de Haas

Hi awesome and thank you I've had 2 surgeries (including 1 today) since we last chatted and I didn't get a chance to try to decipher the columns. So instructions was correct just.. reading itis a pain.

Thank you kindly. This is great information.

Heck its grteat information, maybe do a Blog on it it would help many i think :-)

Cheers!!

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Jelle de Haas 42 on at

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Hi @Michael E. Gernaey,

Oof, two surgeries sound rough. Hope you're recovering well!

No worries at all, glad I could save you the trouble. I'll definitely think about sharing this in a blog post, thanks for the idea.

Cheers and take care.

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