## Why are these changes needed?
| Package | Test time-Origin (Sec) | Test time-Edited (Sec) |
|-------------------------|------------------|-----------------------------------------------|
| autogen-studio | 1.64 | 1.64 |
| autogen-core | 6.03 | 6.17 |
| autogen-ext | 387.15 | 373.40 |
| autogen-agentchat | 54.20 | 20.67 |
## Related issue number
Related #6361
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<https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md> to
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introduced in this PR.
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Rename the `ChatMessage` and `AgentEvent` base classes to `BaseChatMessage` and `BaseAgentEvent`.
Bring back the `ChatMessage` and `AgentEvent` as union of built-in concrete types to avoid breaking existing applications that depends on Pydantic serialization.
Why?
Many existing code uses containers like this:
```python
class AppMessage(BaseModel):
name: str
message: ChatMessage
# Serialization is this:
m = AppMessage(...)
m.model_dump_json()
# Fields like HandoffMessage.target will be lost because it is now treated as a base class without content or target fields.
```
The assumption on `ChatMessage` or `AgentEvent` to be a union of concrete types could be in many existing code bases. So this PR brings back the union types, while keep method type hints such as those on `on_messages` to use the `BaseChatMessage` and `BaseAgentEvent` base classes for flexibility.
This PR refactored `AgentEvent` and `ChatMessage` union types to
abstract base classes. This allows for user-defined message types that
subclass one of the base classes to be used in AgentChat.
To support a unified interface for working with the messages, the base
classes added abstract methods for:
- Convert content to string
- Convert content to a `UserMessage` for model client
- Convert content for rendering in console.
- Dump into a dictionary
- Load and create a new instance from a dictionary
This way, all agents such as `AssistantAgent` and `SocietyOfMindAgent`
can utilize the unified interface to work with any built-in and
user-defined message type.
This PR also introduces a new message type, `StructuredMessage` for
AgentChat (Resolves#5131), which is a generic type that requires a
user-specified content type.
You can create a `StructuredMessage` as follow:
```python
class MessageType(BaseModel):
data: str
references: List[str]
message = StructuredMessage[MessageType](content=MessageType(data="data", references=["a", "b"]), source="user")
# message.content is of type `MessageType`.
```
This PR addresses the receving side of this message type. To produce
this message type from `AssistantAgent`, the work continue in #5934.
Added unit tests to verify this message type works with agents and
teams.
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## Why are these changes needed?
<!-- Please give a short summary of the change and the problem this
solves. -->
To allow serialization of OAI Assistant Agent.
## Related issue number
<!-- For example: "Closes #1234" -->
Closes#5130
## Checks
- [ ] I've included any doc changes needed for
https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/. See
https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/docs/Contribute#documentation to
build and test documentation locally.
- [ ] I've added tests (if relevant) corresponding to the changes
introduced in this PR.
- [ ] I've made sure all auto checks have passed.
Eric Zhu
Victor Dibia
EeS
Leonardo Pinheiro
Jack Gerrits