How to yield a list/array from an Action

[tonny1983]

For some use cases, e.g. generating recipes based on given ingredients, LLM might generate more than one domains. When searching the documents and samples, it seems that context#ai()#create() method just return a single object. Thus, may I know how to handle such cases? Maybe there are several options:

1. let Action returns list/array directly
2. let a domain contains a field which is list/array
3. add a new Action to split the original output and then returns???

[MoermansJ]

Hi @tonny1983, do you have any update or did you solve the issue some other way?

edit:
What worked in my case was

class ListOfType extends ArrayList<Type> {
}

[tonny1983]

No progress in the issue. Spring AI itself seems be able to yield List using ChatClient#responseEntity.

[jorander]

Hi @tonny1983,
I try to always come up with a domain object for both LLM and action method to return, even if it is just a wrapper around a Collection-class. I sense that gives me two advantages:

• The JSON schema generated in the prompt (by Spring AI) is more explicit and easier for models to follow.
• With distinct types added to the Embabel blackboard there is less risk for type collisions by more than one action unintentionally producing the same output type.