Including Conversation History in a Gradio Chat Function

[pietheinstrengholt]

I have written this function to use the OpenAI Agent SDK along with Gradio. I would like to pass in the history. I learned that you can use the result.to_input_list() function to obtain an input list that concatenates the original input you provided. However, how does this work with the code below?

async def chat(message, history):
    try:
        # Make an agent with name, instructions, model
        agent = Agent(
            name="ADR Writer", 
            instructions=system_prompt,
            model=OpenAIChatCompletionsModel(
                model="gpt-4o-mini",
                openai_client=openai_client
            ),
            tools=tools
        )
        result = await Runner.run(agent, message)
        return result.final_output
    except OpenAIError as e:
        print(f"OpenAI API Error: {str(e)}")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"An unexpected error occurred: {str(e)}")

gr.ChatInterface(fn=chat, type="messages").launch()

[seratch]

Hi, we're unable to help you for other tool questions in depth, but perhaps you may want to pass the history data as the input when calling Runner.run. Without that, your agent doesn't understand the context of the conversation. Please refer to their document pages for details: https://www.gradio.app/guides/chatinterface-examples

Hope you'll figure how to use the tools along with Agents SDK out!

[pietheinstrengholt]

Thanks for your quick response. I've added a debug:

        print(f"Chat message: {message}")
        print(f"Chat history: {history}")
        print(f"Type of message: {type(message)}")
        print(f"Type of history: {type(history)}")

Here's the output:

Chat message: test
Chat history: []
Type of message: <class 'str'>
Type of history: <class 'list'>
Chat message: test
Chat history: [{'role': 'user', 'metadata': None, 'content': 'test', 'options': None}, {'role': 'assistant', 'metadata': None, 'content': "Hello! I’m here to assist you!", 'options': None}]
Type of message: <class 'str'>
Type of history: <class 'list'>

I've tried passing in this:

result = await Runner.run(agent, history + [{"role":"user", "content": message}])

or this:

history.append({"role": "user", "content": message})
result = await Runner.run(agent, history)

But this doesn't seem to work. It only works for the first message, but for the second message I get the following error:

An unexpected error occurred: Unhandled item type or structure: {'role': 'user', 'metadata': None, 'content': 'test', 'options': None}
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get'

[seratch]

Unhandled item type or structure:

This is because you're using Chat Completions model and passing unexpected data in some way. If you don't have a certain reason to use Chat Completions, go ahead with gpt-4.1-mini etc. with the default Responses API (meaning just passing model name string to the agent). For the API call, you can pass simple "role" & "content" items.

[pietheinstrengholt]

Thanks! I was able to solve this using your help. This is the code that works.

async def chat(message, history):
    # Process the incoming message and history. Only select and use content attributes
    processed_history = []
    for msg in history:
        processed_history.append({"role": msg['role'], "content": msg['content']})

    # Append the new user message
    processed_history.append({"role": "user", "content": message})

    try:
        print(f"Processed history: {processed_history}")
        # Make an agent with name, instructions, model
        agent = Agent(
            name="ADR Writer", 
            instructions=system_prompt,
            model=OpenAIChatCompletionsModel(
                model="gpt-4o-mini",
                openai_client=openai_client
            ),
            tools=tools
        )
        result = await Runner.run(agent, processed_history)
        return result.final_output
    except OpenAIError as e:
        print(f"OpenAI API Error: {str(e)}")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"An unexpected error occurred: {str(e)}")

gr.ChatInterface(fn=chat, type="messages").launch()