Agent protocols

The μAgents framework supports capturing related message types and handlers in protocols. Agents who include the same protocol will be able to communicate with each other.

A protocol is built similar to an agent, but it has no identity and cannot be run. It contains only the message types and handlers that define some component of agent functionality.

To show how this works, we will use a simple restaurant table booking request as an example. We first need to define the type of messages that the handler will receive and send. Here we define BookTableRequest which will contain the requested table number and BookTableResponse which will inform the user if that table is available.

from uagents import Context, Model, Protocol


class BookTableRequest(Model):
    table_number: int


class BookTableResponse(Model):
    success: bool

Now we define the booking protocol as book_proto and we define the desired logic to determine if the BookTableResponse will be successful or not.

book_proto = Protocol()


@book_proto.on_message(model=BookTableRequest, replies={BookTableResponse})
async def handle_book_request(ctx: Context, sender: str, msg: BookTableRequest):
    if ctx.storage.has(str(msg.table_number)):
        success = False
    else:
        success = True
        ctx.storage.set(str(msg.table_number), sender)

    # send the response
    await ctx.send(sender, BookTableResponse(success=success))

We will create a folder named protocols and save this file in it as book.py. We can then import it from the agent script:

from protocols.book import book_proto

Then, if your agent is called restaurant you can include the protocol in this way:

restaurant.include(book_proto)