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FAQ

Frequently asked questions about application development, knowledge bases, and data management on the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (阿里云百炼) platform

Frequently asked questions about Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (阿里云百炼) applications and knowledge bases.

Application Development

The core difference lies in the development approach and target scenarios:
  • Agent: Configured visually in the console with no coding required. Supports plugin marketplace selection, knowledge base integration, MCP tool access, application component reuse, and memory. Ideal for quickly building conversational applications.
  • Assistant API: Called via code using the DashScope SDK, following the flow of creating an Assistant, creating a Thread, sending a Message, and starting a Run. Supports tools such as the code interpreter and function calling. Ideal for developers who need to integrate agents into their own systems.
Five plugin capabilities are currently provided: Python code interpreter, calculator, Quark search, QR code generation, and GitHub search. Some plugins require approval before use.
Custom plugin services are currently free of charge. However, configuring an agent API may incur charges when it involves prompt optimization, application invocation, or testing in the test window.
Custom API plugins follow the protocol and pass information to the large model for understanding. For functions, the large model learns the passed parameters and returns complete results.
Custom headers are not supported; only authorization is supported.
Set the following parameters:
stream=True,              # Set output mode to streaming
incremental_output=True   # Incremental streaming output
** ** is the Markdown syntax for bold. When rendering model-generated content on the frontend, parse the Markdown syntax and render it accordingly.

Knowledge Base and RAG

With its powerful retrieval and generation capabilities, RAG is widely used across many domains, including Q&A systems, dialogue systems, text summarization, knowledge graph construction and reasoning, education and training, customer service, news and content creation, and intelligent search and recommendation.
You can click the feedback button below the model's response, select the issue type, and submit. You can also copy the RequestId and submit feedback via an Alibaba Cloud ticket.
Retrieval is performed in parallel according to each knowledge base's configuration, and then the TopN results are selected based on score.

Data Management

When uploading a PDF file, make sure the file extension is lowercase pdf.
It is used to verify that the uploaded file is complete.
Check whether there are empty rows in the table data. If there are empty rows, subsequent data will not be recognized. If the first row is empty, the file is treated as empty.

Managed Agents

Managed Agents support mainstream large language models on the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (阿里云百炼) platform, including the Qwen series. For the specific list of supported models, check the available models when creating an Agent in the console.
In the "Tools" module of the Agent configuration page, select "MCP Service" and enter the MCP service's endpoint address. For detailed steps, refer to the MCP Service Integration documentation.

CLI

The active credential is a standard API Key (the default profile). Token Plan requires your subscription API Key signed in to the token-plan profile; run bl auth status --output json to see which credential is active.
Sign in with your subscription API Key: bl auth login --config token-plan --api-key <sk-sp-Key>. If the profile already exists, switch to it with bl config use --name token-plan.
No. Model-call commands work; console features (such as app list, usage free, workspace) require console login (bl auth login --console), and Token Plan seat management additionally needs Alibaba Cloud OpenAPI AK/SK credentials.
Run bl auth status --output json to inspect the active credential (masked), bl config list to list all profiles, and bl config use --name <profile> to switch the active profile.
For more CLI FAQs (installation, Skills, and troubleshooting), see the "Troubleshooting" section of Installation & Authentication.