spring-ai-playground

description: Tutorial 7 - chain two built-in tools (getWeather → sendSlackMessage) in a single chat turn. See the agent loop chain real actions.

Tutorial 7 - Weather to Slack - A Two-Tool Chain

Time 4 min · Difficulty ★★★ · Surfaces Agentic Chat

!!! abstract “Goal” Trigger a chain of two built-in tools (getWeather → sendSlackMessage) in a single chat turn. Watch the agent loop in action: plan → call tool A → read result → call tool B with that result → summarize.

This is the canonical “try an agentic workflow” task on the Home checklist. No Tool Studio authoring required - both tools are pre-loaded and already passed their Local Pass.

!!! warning “Slack webhook required” sendSlackMessage posts to whatever URL is in SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL. Set it in the desktop launcher’s Environment Variables (or as a shell env var when running from source) before launching the app. Without it, the second tool call will fail and the chain breaks at step 2.

Steps

1. In Agentic Chat, switch to a tool-capable model (qwen3.5:9b works; gemma4:e4b chains more reliably for longer prompts), tick Manual built-in tool selection, and confirm getWeather and sendSlackMessage are selected in the exposed-tools list.

2. Send this prompt verbatim:

    Get today's weather for Seoul and send a short summary to Slack.
   

① Built-in MCP enabled - getWeather and sendSlackMessage are both in the inventory, ② one prompt that requires two tool calls in the right order.

1. Watch the chat stream:
   • the assistant calls getWeather with Seoul
   • the tool returns a compact weather payload
   • the assistant reasons over the result and calls sendSlackMessage with a short natural-language summary
   • the assistant’s final turn confirms the post
2. Open Slack and verify the message landed.

What to validate

• Two distinct tool calls in order, not one. The MCP TOOLS block in the trace should list both, with getWeather before sendSlackMessage.
• The Slack message body is derived from the weather result - the agent is chaining, not guessing.
• If either tool fails, the failure surfaces in the chat with the tool name and error. The same failure would have blocked the tool from earning its Local Pass - so sendSlackMessage failing here means the webhook URL is wrong, not the tool itself.

Where to go from here

• Replace sendSlackMessage with a Tool Studio tool of your own. The moment it passes its Local Pass, it’s live on the built-in MCP server and the chat can use it the same way.
• Combine this flow with a RAG document - “summarize this policy document and post the summary to Slack” - and you’ve got Tutorial 6’s composition phrased as a real task.

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