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Redefining application variables in AIP agents

Date published: 2025-03-27

To better integrate the AIP Interactive Widget with other widgets in your Workshop modules, we have significantly improved the application variable system for AIP agents. Application variables within AIP agents can be used as deterministic outputs from tools and ontology context. The AIP Interactive Widget also offers additional variables that can be used to create new sessions from external widgets and automatically send messages using Workshop events.

Access mode configuration replaced with new application variable update tool

The configuration for access mode previously allowed you to determine whether the agent could update a variable or if the value was "read-only." Internally, this involved using a tool to update application state, which required the agent to specify the variable UUID for updates. However, this method was potentially unreliable, as the agent sometimes failed to apply updates before returning the final response. To address these issues, we replaced this access mode with the Update application variable tool, featuring enhanced prompting. When creating a variable, you will now need to manually add the variable with this tool to align with the read/write access configuration.

Existing agents do not need to be updated, as we performed a migration in the backend.

This Update application variable tool enhances transparency by clearly revealing the underlying processes and allows users greater flexibility in configuring the system. Additionally, it enables the language model to specify updates by variable name rather than by ID, resulting in improved performance. Consequently, the variable ID is no longer included in the prompt.

The update application variable option in the Add tool dropdown menu.

Introducing value visibility for variables

The LLM does not need to know about every variable; for example, a variable you use as input to function RAG, ontology context RAG, and so on may have no purpose in the compiled prompt. Before this update, each variable was automatically included in the prompt (comprising the name, current value, and description). You can now choose to remove the variable's visibility from the compiled system prompt. We recommend only including variable visibility when necessary, as reducing the amount of context provided to the LLM can decrease confusion and improve accuracy.

New option to hide the variable value from an agent.

Deterministic updates for variables

The Update application variable tool introduces an additional step in the thought process that is not always necessary. We observed that users often anticipate variable updates following the ontology context RAG, functions, and the object query tool. To accommodate this, we are introducing the capability to configure a variable as a "deterministic" output for each of these scenarios. When using the tool, ensure that the variable type matches the output type of the respective tool or context.

In most cases, we strongly recommend prioritizing deterministic updates whenever feasible, rather than relying on the Update application variable tool. For the Object query tool, you can designate an output object set variable for each configured object type. With the Call function tool, you can map functions that have either string or object set outputs to a corresponding variable of the same type. Regarding ontology RAG, you can select an output object type variable that will update with the K most relevant objects after each response.

Select an object set output variable to update with the K most relevant objects after each response.

Deterministic input for object query tool

The Object query tool can also be provided with a initial variable rather than having the agent specify the starting object set. This can be done by mapping the input variable for each object type in the tool configuration. This is useful if you want the object query tool to start from a pre-filtered object set without any additional prompting.

Where desired, provide an initial variable instead of having the agent specify the starting object set.

Ontology context citation object set variable

Selecting an ontology context citation in the agent response will link out to object views in a new tab. To keep users within the same module, we added a citation variable to the ontology context configuration. When a citation is selected, this variable will update with a static object set containing just the citation object. This is useful for showing a preview of the object in another widget alongside the interactive widget, and more.

Select a citation variable in the ontology context configuration to update with a static object set containing just the citation object.

The AIP Interactive Widget has an updated configuration panel to improve integration within your Workshop module. The new textbox variable refers to the text of the user textbox. As the user enters text, the variable automatically updates to match the value in the textbox. If the variable is changed from outside the AIP Interactive Widget, a new message with the current value of the variable is sent.

Additionally, to connect the active session to a string Workshop variable, we introduced an active session identifier variable which is always up-to-date with the current sessionRid. If you change this variable from outside the AIP Interactive Widget, either a new session will be automatically created or an existing session will be switched to if the change contains a sessionRid.

We also added a Boolean toggle to hide session history by default. If this toggle is true, regardless of the width of the widget, session history will automatically be collapsed when the module loads.

We want to hear what you think about these updates. Send your feedback to our Palantir Support teams, or share in our Developer Community ↗ using the aip-agents tag ↗.

NEXTMarch 2025

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