AI Agents with MCP

Chapter 4. MCP Clients: Advanced Use and Best Practices

A Note for Early Release Readers

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At the base of MCP, as well as the various SDK implementations of the protocol, is a system that sends and receives messages between clients and servers. In the Python SDK, all of the session methods we wrapped themselves wrap a send_request() method. This method can be found in mcp.shared.session.BaseSession, which both the client- and server-specific Session classes inherit from. Because of this, you could theoretically also send your own custom requests to a server that supports them, but will have to create your own Request, RequestParams, and Result classes to do so.

There are a few other methods you can make use of in the client session object. send_ping() sends a ping request to the connected server. The server will then return an EmptyResult within a ServerResult, which carries no data but signifies the presence of a working connection to the server. set_logging_level(), given a LoggingLevel object from MCP’s types library, can ...