How to pass session to guardrail

[galshi]

Question

I’m building an input guardrail for a chatbot that needs to detect repeated questions, so it has to see the previous conversation.

I’m using SQLiteSession (but this applies to anything from SessionABC, not sure about Conversations API memory). The docs don’t show passing session data. I tried putting the session in the context, which works but feels hacky. Then I hit this error:

agents.exceptions.UserError: Cannot provide both a session and a list of input items. When using session memory, provide only a string input to append to the conversation, or use session=None and provide a list to manually manage conversation history.

I can work around it, but it feels like too much hassle for something that sounds like a common use case. Am I doing something wrong, is this a reasonable way to use an input guardrail?

[AreebaxIrfan]

If you’re using a session, just pass the user’s text (not a list) and let the session store history — check that history for repeats to apply your guardrail. If you don’t want a session, set session=None and manage the whole conversation list yourself.

[galshi]

That's what I'm doing, I was just wondering if it's wrong.
An example in the documentation of using a guardrail with a session would be helpful.

[galshi]

It looks like the session is added to the guardrail automatically when present, which is why I'm getting input items instead of a string. This behavior should probably be documented in the docs.