You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
- Add link to schema changes PR modelcontextprotocol#2110
- Reorder Alternatives Considered (Resources first)
- Fix prettier formatting
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Copy file name to clipboardExpand all lines: seps/2084-primitive-groups.md
+4-7Lines changed: 4 additions & 7 deletions
Display the source diff
Display the rich diff
Original file line number
Diff line number
Diff line change
@@ -201,25 +201,22 @@ This specification proposal was selected for its ease of understanding since it
201
201
202
202
### Alternatives Considered
203
203
204
+
-**Groups as MCP Resources instead of new primitive:** A completely separate proposal where the group metadata is declared in MCP resources with a specific schema and mimeType, referenced by their URIs, e.g., `mcp://groups/{groupId}`. Servers MAY publish the group index at a URI which MUST be defined in the capabilities object during the server initialization. This proposal could reduce spec changes and implementation effort significantly, but it was not considered as intuitive.
205
+
204
206
-**Primitive's group list passed in a first class `groups` property:** A variation of the proposed specification, but the list of groups to which a primitive instance belongs would be presented by a `groups` property added to the top level of each primitive's schema.
205
207
This idea was discarded because it could lead to backward compatibility issues. For instance, if a server returned a tool, resource, etc, with this property to an older client which validated it against a strict schema that did not contain this property, it would most likely cause an error.
206
208
Since this proposal spans all primitives, such a compatibility failure would be unacceptable. Consequently, we settled on using a reserved metadata key to pass the primitive's group list.
207
209
208
-
209
210
-**Primitive's group list as an array of Group instances not names:** A variation of the proposed specification, but the schema would reference the Groups definition instead of declaring a string (group name). This means that full Group instances would appear in the primitive's group list, significantly increasing the token count when passed to an LLM without modification. Also, beacuse groups can be hierarchical, every child of a given group would carry a duplicate of the parent instance. There was discussion of mitigating the duplication on the line using libraries that perform a marshalling on send/receive, replacing the parent with a pointer to a single copy of the parent instance. This would put an unnecessary burden on SDK developers for no clear benefit, when a client can easily look up a group by name in its cached `groups/list` result.
210
211
211
-
212
-
-**Groups as MCP Resources instead of new primitive:** A completely separate proposal where the group metadata is declared in MCP resources with a specific schema and mimeType, referenced by their URIs, e.g., `mcp://groups/{groupId}`. Servers MAY publish the group index at a URI which MUST be defined in the capabilities object during the server initialization. This proposal could reduce spec changes and implementation effort significantly, but it was not considered as intuitive.
213
-
214
212
## Security Implications
215
213
216
214
None identified
217
215
218
216
## Reference Implementation
219
217
220
-
- Fully implemented Typescript SDK changes with unit tests.
221
-
- Includes documented client and server examples.
222
-
- Check out the [Draft PR](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk/pull/1399) for details.
-**TypeScript SDK:**[PR #1399](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk/pull/1399) - Fully implemented with unit tests and documented client/server examples.
223
220
224
221
The reference implementation's example client and server demonstrate how groups, tools, prompts, and resources can be grouped on the server, and the client can filter them by group. It manually demonstrates how an agent using the server could easily reduce the tokens placed into an LLM's context by only including the primitives in one or more groups rather than providing the full list.
0 commit comments