Hi all,

I am testing Fabric item deployment using the fabric-cicd Python library and have hit a serious issue with Fabric Data Pipelines. I wanted to document it clearly because it looks like pipeline activities can be deployed with connection/database references that appear correct in the UI and JSON, but do not actually work at runtime until the activity is manually refreshed/reselected in the Fabric UI.

Summary

I am deploying Fabric items from a Dev workspace into Test and Production using fabric-cicd.

The deployment itself succeeds. The target workspace receives the expected items (Lookups, Notebooks, Invoke Pipeline etc)

The replacement map is also being applied correctly. For example, Dev SQL connection IDs are replaced with Test SQL connection IDs, Dev database names are replaced with Test database names, and Dev workspace/lakehouse IDs are replaced with Test IDs. Notebook connections and Fabric Pipeline connections too.

However, after deployment, some activities fail at runtime even though the UI shows the correct target connection, database, and stored procedure.

The failure can be fixed manually in the SQL example, by opening the deployed pipeline activity, changing the database dropdown to master, then changing it back to the correct database, then reselecting the stored procedure and saving the pipeline. No actual connection change.

Also, for invoke pipeline, I'd get unable to acquire user token, but I could fix it by changing the activity description and re-saving.

This suggests the deployed activity has stale/corrupt internal binding state even though the visible connection settings look correct.

Questions

Has anyone else seen this with Fabric Data Pipeline deployment using fabric-cicd?

Is there a known post-deployment step required to force Fabric to rebind Data Pipeline activity references?

Is this a Fabric service issue, a known limitation of Data Pipeline deployment through REST APIs, or something the fabric-cicd library can handle?

At the moment, my conclusion is that fabric-cicd successfully deploys the item definition,
but Fabric Data Pipeline activities may retain stale internal binding state after deployment.

Any advice or confirmation would be greatly appreciated.