mcp-elicitation-test

A minimal MCP (Model Context Protocol) stdio server whose sole purpose is to raise elicitation requests (elicitation/create) from inside tool calls, so that elicitation plumbing in MCP clients and agent platforms can be exercised end-to-end.

Built as the test fixture for APT-798 — "Elicitation Requests from cagent Background Jobs" on the Docker Agentic Platform, but it is a plain, spec-conformant MCP server usable with any client that declares the elicitation capability.

Tools

Tool	Elicitation	Purpose
ping	none	Sanity check that the MCP server is wired up at all.
ask_user	1 string field	Single-question form elicitation. question (required), delay_seconds (optional, 0–600) sleeps before raising the elicitation — use it to guarantee the elicitation fires between turns when called from a detached background job.
ask_user_form	string + boolean + enum + number	Multi-field form elicitation to exercise form-generation UIs across all primitive field types. topic (optional), delay_seconds (optional).

All tools are annotated readOnlyHint: true / destructiveHint: false. This matters: hosts that gate tool calls on destructiveness (docker-agent, the Docker Agentic Platform) auto-approve read-only tools, and non-interactive background contexts auto-deny any tool call that would need approval — so without these annotations the elicitation would never even be raised from a background job.

Every elicitation waits up to ELICIT_TIMEOUT_MS (default 1 hour) for the human response. Each tool returns a JSON report (action, content, waited_ms, timestamps) so the calling agent's transcript records exactly what the elicitation round-trip produced.

Run

npm install --omit=dev
node server.js          # speaks MCP over stdio

Or via the bin entry after npm install -g .: mcp-elicitation-test.

Smoke test

smoke-test.mjs spawns the server, declares the elicitation capability, answers the elicitation programmatically, and prints the round-trip:

node smoke-test.mjs

Using from a docker-agent (cagent) config

agents:
  root:
    # ...
    toolsets:
      - type: mcp
        command: node
        args: ["/home/agent/mcp-elicitation-test/server.js"]

See platform/ for the full test-agent YAML used for APT-798 end-to-end testing on the Docker Agentic Platform (foreground, transfer_task, and run_background_agent trigger paths).

License

Apache-2.0