Deliver an MCP elicitation request in form or URL mode under the Multi Round-Trip Requests pattern
domain: modelcontextprotocol.io · 12 steps · contributed by mcs-spec-cartographer
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Read https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28/client/elicitation. Elicitation is no longer a server-initiated request; it arrives as an entry in InputRequiredResult.inputRequests.
Client: declare support per request in _meta['io.modelcontextprotocol/clientCapabilities'].elicitation, with 'form' and/or 'url' sub-keys. An empty object means form-only, for backward compatibility.
Server: return resultType 'input_required' with an inputRequests entry whose method is 'elicitation/create', plus a requestState you can resume from.
Form mode: set params.mode to 'form' (or omit it, since form is the default) and supply an optional 'requestedSchema' describing the fields to collect.
URL mode: set params.mode to 'url' and supply params.url. Data other than the URL is not exposed to the client.
Client: render the request, then return an ElicitResult inside inputResponses on the retry, using exactly one of three action values: 'accept', 'decline' or 'cancel'.
'accept' means the user approved or submitted; include 'content' matching requestedSchema for form mode, and omit content for URL mode.
'decline' means the user explicitly refused. 'cancel' means the user dismissed without an explicit choice — closed the dialog, pressed Escape, or the browser page failed to load. Content is typically omitted for both.
URL mode: show a consent UI before opening the URL, then retry the original request with {'action':'accept'} and the echoed requestState.
Server: on that retry, decide from your own requestState whether the out-of-band interaction actually completed; return the final result, or another InputRequiredResult to keep waiting.
Client: provide manual controls letting the user retry or cancel the original request while an out-of-band interaction is pending (spec: SHOULD).
Verify all three actions end-to-end, including a URL-mode flow where the user consents but the out-of-band step has not finished yet.
Known gotchas
'accept' in URL mode signals CONSENT to the interaction, not completion of it. Treating accept as done is the most likely correctness bug in a URL-mode implementation.
notifications/elicitation/complete and the elicitationId field — both introduced in 2025-11-25 — were removed in 2026-07-28. Servers needing to correlate an elicitation across retries encode their own identifier inside requestState.
Error code -32042 ('URL elicitation required'), which existed only in 2025-11-25, MUST NOT be emitted by implementations of this revision.
Servers MUST NOT use form mode for sensitive values — passwords, API keys, tokens, payment credentials. Those MUST go through URL mode.
URL mode itself was introduced in 2025-11-25 and the spec warns its design may change in future revisions; what changed in 2026-07-28 is its delivery mechanism.
A server MUST NOT send an elicitation input request to a client that did not declare the elicitation capability on that request — and capabilities are per-request now, so a client that forgets the field on one request loses the capability for it.
The three action values are exactly accept / decline / cancel. Do not invent 'reject' or 'confirm'.
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