Issue: State Persistence Failure for Custom Attributes in `TurnState`

[Anilalkg]

Hi Experts,

Could you please help me with this issue ?

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Issue: State Persistence Failure for Custom Attributes in TurnState

Description

In a multi-turn conversation (specifically when handling Adaptive Card Submit actions), custom attributes defined on an AppTurnState subclass do not persist across turns. While the conversation bucket is successfully saved to storage, standard Python class attributes are lost when the AgentApplication creates a new instance of the state for the next turn.

Environment

• SDK: microsoft-agents Python
• Hosting: hosting.core
• Storage: MemoryStorage (or any storage where code reloads/new turns occur)

Code Snippet: The Current State Definition

The state is currently defined as a standard class attribute:

class AppTurnState(TurnState):
    """Extended TurnState with job requisition draft."""
    # This attribute is ephemeral and does not map to the persistent conversation bucket
    job_draft: Optional[JobRequisitionDraft] = None

The Failure Flow

1. Turn 1 (Message Received):

# Logic creates a draft and saves state
_state.job_draft = JobRequisitionDraft(job_title="AI Developer", department="Azure")
await _state.save(context) 
# Logs show: DEBUG: Save complete. Conversation ID: 4AUjYs...

2. Turn 2 (Adaptive Card Action/Next Message):

# Context/Conversation ID matches Turn 1
# Attempting to access the data
print(_state.job_draft) # Result: AttributeError: 'TurnState' object has no attribute 'job_draft'
# OR
draft_dict = await _state.conversation.load(context) # Result: {}

Logs

ACTION-- submit_update_choice
Card Data-- {'action': 'submit_update_choice', 'jobTitle': 'Ai Developer', 'department': 'Azure'}
DEBUG: Loading state for ID: 4AUjYsFG2rGHyh5El9deRB-us
532-- {}
AttributeError: 'TurnState' object has no attribute 'job_draft'

[Anilalkg]

hi @team, @tracyboehrer ,

Any update, we are struck here, can you please help,

[rodrigobr-msft]

Hi @Anilalkg, thank you for your question! This is a good reminder for us to improve our documentation to make this side of the SDK clearer for end users!

Anyways, TurnState is a collection of AgentStates which define different scopes. Only adding a new field in a child class of TurnState will not get the behavior you desire because only the AgentState scopes are saved on TurnState.save() calls.

I suggest that you save job_draft in the ConversationState (or UserState) scope with either:

_state.conversation.set_value("job_draft", ...)

or

_state.set_value("ConversationState.job_draft")

I don't know if you already have this in your code, but ensure that JobRequisitionDraft is a child of StoreItem and implements the store_item_to_json and from_json_to_store_item methods.