DB - 7 new best practices

[CATDAB]

• RAI Error Handling — Catch OpenAI RAI content filtering errors in the OnError topic, classify by subcode (violence, hate, sexual, self-harm, jailbreak, indirect attack), and return targeted user-friendly responses instead of generic error messages
  • Deterministic MCP Server Tool Calls — Two approaches for ensuring MCP tools fire reliably: naming them in agent instructions or wrapping them in a dedicated child agent with trigger phrases
  • Citations in Adaptive Cards for Teams — Replace default Teams citation rendering with a collapsible Adaptive Card showing numbered, clickable references using ForAll() over CitationSources

[ericsche]

Like the approach.
But we should add a bit more information before adding it :

1. Do we targer every channel or only Teams / Copilot ?
2. in the Challenge / Why highlight limited support for streamind UI patterns that would diplay planner actions.
3. in the solution share that we are actually send a message that will induce a behavior change. We've seen customers not liking multiple messages in a response.

Also I would strongly push back on Option B as OnKnowledgeRequest topics are run sequentially adding latency on top of normal processing. AI Prompt usually takes between 4 to 6 sec e2e adding too much latency. A normal knowledge search take 7s so we are adding near to 80% more.

[CATDAB]

Agree on all counts. Will update the best practice accordingly.

[ericsche]

Step one you should apply the same filtering logic to only change that for the teams channel using the channelID condition used in another BP you shared. Today CA publish in Teams are published in Copilot that might not be the same in output.
For me this one need a big change as it covers only topics with Generative answer node.
I would extend this BP to leverage this article : https://microsoft.github.io/mcscatblog/posts/remove-citations-in-copilot-studio-answer/ so we are more comprehensive in the response generated.

[CATDAB]

Pulled this one from the PR will combine with citation delete.

[ericsche]

I'm not sure the AI prompt is needed.
I believe that the RAI Subcodes is included in the System.Error.Code so just the condition approach would be good and way faster.

[CATDAB]

100% agree subcode checking is faster. I confirmed today that they are currently not being returned for a customer of mine and in my environments with gpt5 ICM here: https://portal.microsofticm.com/imp/v5/incidents/details/763985063/summary. I can pull this one out of the pr until we get closure. If subcodes are indeed broken we'll go with the prompt method, if they start working again I'll update to subcode check condition first with a prompt as a backup.

[ericsche]

For the Knowledge-hold-message I would change that phrase :
Read this best-practice when:

• The user specifically complains about latency or slow response times during knowledge search

It should be : "The user complains about the lack of activity or streaming UI during knowledge search"

Your BP is not helping about reducing the response time, it could be missleading :)

[CATDAB]

PR now contains 7 best practice files plus the SKILL.md update:

1. chain-of-thought-logging.md
2. conversation-history-variable.md
3. deterministic-mcp-calls.md
4. knowledge-hold-message.md
5. line-breaks-in-messages.md
6. rai-error-handling.md
7. start-over-restart-conversation-v2.md

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