How do i create tools that need credentials?

[Nathan-Intergral]

Hi all,

I was wondering if someone could help me out that something that has been a sore point for a while in my application.

I started out making my autogen application following the docs for adding tools the standard way, using the register_for_llm etc etc. However quickly ran in to a problem when i needed to provide auth credentials for an account in the tool for an api call. I ended up trying to solve this with a singleton to store these details but realised quickly that wouldn't work as am working with a service that accepts requests from multiple tenants at any given time.

I ended up switching to using functions and using Langchain Tool classes so that i could initialise the class with any parameters i wanted, auth token etc. Which is working for me now.

However, i have recently learned that functions are a deprecated feature of OpenAI and theres several downsides to using functions over tools. With that in mind, id like to switch back to tools but I have no idea how to get around the issue i described above.

Does anyone know how i can provide parameters like auth headers, contexts etc to tools in a multi tenant environment?

Thanks in advance.

[ekzhu]

I ended up switching to using functions and using Langchain Tool classes so that i could initialise the class with any parameters i wanted, auth token etc. Which is working for me now.

Could you provide an example of how this solves your problem? If you want to have different credentials for different instance of invocation, you can use a simple function wrapper.

[Nathan-Intergral]

ah interesting.. Okay i get the idea, ill take a look. Thank you!

[Abhishektght]

how can we use this with autogen assistant agent after registering it?

[ekzhu]

In v0.2, besides registering to the assistant agent, you also need to register the tool to a user proxy to execute it. And then start a two agent chat.

For 0.4 see: https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/stable/user-guide/agentchat-user-guide/quickstart.html

A community extension for MCP server is also available.

[meghayarnit]

@ekzhu : Is there another way to handle passing credentials in 0.4? Or is functools.update_wrapper still the best way? I have a similar issue, but I just need to pass a user_id to the tool for traceability

[ekzhu]

ContextVar? https://docs.python.org/3/library/contextvars.html

You can create a context when starting your workflow, and all the tools inside it will have access to variables (e.g., ids, etc.) defined in your context.

We are using this for a different purpose here: https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/blob/main/python/packages/autogen-core/src/autogen_core/_agent_instantiation.py