Handling Messages

What happens when an agent receives a message?

The Context passed to every agent provides a list of messages in the agent's inbox accessible via the context.messages() function. Here we can iterate through the list of messages sent to the agent and use that information to make decisions or change state. Note that the to field has been replaced by from.

context {
    messages(): [
        {
            "from": "string" // uuid of agent who sent the message
            "type": "string" // describing contents or purpose
            "data": "any" // additional data contained in the message
        }
    ],
}

It's best to think of the messages field like a mailbox.

• When sending a message, we put the message in the outbox under the messages field on state.
• When receiving a message, it will show up in our inbox, under the messages field on context.

Notice the distinction. Context is immutable and any accidental changes made to it will not propagate.

Handling the messages here would be pretty simple - just iterating through the messages array in context.

const behavior = (state, context) => {
    for (const message of context.messages()) {
        ...
    }

    // OR

    context.messages().forEach(m => {
        ...
    })
}

The messages that an agent receives are only available on the timestep they received them. context.messages() is cleared between timesteps, so an agent will need to store the messages on their state if they want to preserve a message.