.NET: Python: suggestion - add clear_messages() method to ChatMessageStoreProtocol

[anguzo]

Explnation:

The ChatMessageStoreProtocol currently defines methods for adding and listing messages, but lacks a method to clear/delete all messages. This is needed for common use cases like:

• User-initiated conversation resets
• Cleaning up test data
• Implementing privacy/data retention policies
• Starting fresh conversations in chat applications

Proposed Solution:

Add the following method to ChatMessageStoreProtocol:

async def clear_messages(self) -> None:
    """
    Clear all messages from the message store.
    
    This method should remove all persisted messages, allowing
    the conversation to start fresh.
    """
    ...

Workaround:

Currently using an extended protocol in my codebase:

@runtime_checkable
class ExtendedChatMessageStoreProtocol(ChatMessageStoreProtocol, Protocol):
    async def clear_messages(self) -> None: ...

[westey-m]

The ChatMessageStore is really not intended to be a full abstraction for managing chat history. We need to reconsider its name to make it clear that it is really just about providing a view of the chat history required by the agent for execution, plus appending messages produced by the agent.

While it is of course possible to create a fully fledged Chat History storage abstraction with full CRUD support, that would be a separate feature and outside the scope of this abstraction.

[anguzo]

The protocol already defines full state management, not just a "view", through methods like serialize(), update_from_state(), and deserialize(). More importantly, the framework's own implementations already provide clear_messages() functionality: the Python RedisChatMessageStore explicitly documents "DELETE: Clear all messages for a thread" as a core feature, while the .NET CosmosChatMessageStore and InMemoryChatMessageStore both implement ClearMessagesAsync() and Clear() respectively. Adding clear_messages() to the protocol simply makes this existing capability explicit rather than expanding scope, eliminating inconsistency and the need for custom wrapper protocols when users implement their own stores (and implementing own stores through which chat history is persisted and managed is a promoted feature of agent-framework based on examples and provided redis store).

My specific use case is actually tied to Microsoft Teams chat design limitations, which does not enable users to have several chats using one "chat app" and only enables users to clear chat history with deleting the said chat bot from the list of chats. This would obviously be bad UX and my solution was to enable users to reset LLM chat memory using a message, which is also not the best UX, but better. It also preserves whole history of previous conversations which somewhat mitigates not being able store separate chats. It is not like Agent Framework should concern itself with issues of Microsoft Teams, but I just wanted to outline example use case of enabling a user conversing with agent not only to "add_messages" and "list_messages" but also to "clear_messages".