com.smartgwt.client.docs

Interface IntegratingAI

public interface IntegratingAI

Integrating AI Technology

AI technology is woven into the Smart GWT framework, not only at a base level, but also systemically. With only minimal changes to application code, surprisingly sophisticated, AI-powered enhancements can be enabled that have the ability to turn the users of your application into power users. For example, users of your application can use natural language to:

• Filter a ListGrid according to their description of the records to include or exclude.
• Add a custom field to a ListGrid, combining data from the underlying dataSource or augmenting the data with AI-provided knowledge.
• Sort the data of a ListGrid according to the user's description of how the data should be ordered.
• Build a custom DataBoundComponent using available dataSources according to the user's description of what they would like to see.

The AIEngine class

Communication with AI services is performed by instances of the AIEngine class. The following engines are built-in and don't require registration. Just put the appropriate API key in your server configuration file.

Note that this engine does not support vision requests.

Engine ID	Provider	Name	Additional Installation Notes
"gpt-3.5-turbo"	OpenAI	GPT-3.5 Turbo	You must obtain an API key having access to the model(s) from: https://platform.openai.com/api-keys Then, the value of server configuration property OpenAI.api.key must be set to your API key. The o-series models may require higher tier API access.
"gpt-4"	OpenAI	GPT-4
"gpt-4-turbo"	OpenAI	GPT-4 Turbo
"gpt-4o"	OpenAI	GPT-4o
"gpt-4o-mini"	OpenAI	GPT-4o mini
"gpt-4.1"	OpenAI	GPT-4.1
"gpt-4.1-mini"	OpenAI	GPT-4.1 mini
"gpt-4.1-nano"	OpenAI	GPT-4.1 nano
"o1"	OpenAI	o1
"o3"	OpenAI	o3
"o3-mini"	OpenAI	o3-mini
"o4-mini"	OpenAI	o4-mini
"gemini-pro"	Google	Gemini Pro & Gemini Pro Vision	You must obtain an API key having access to these models from: https://makersuite.google.com/app/apikey?authuser=1 Then, the value of server configuration property Gemini.api.key must be set to your API key.
"bedrock"	AWS Bedrock	Many different models are available, see the "AWS Bedrock" section below	You must obtain an API key from here (replacing $REGION with your region, eg "us-east-2"): https://$REGION.console.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/home?region=$REGION#/api-keys?tab=long-term"> Then you need to request access to the model(s) you wish to use here (again, replacing $REGION): https://$REGION.console.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/home?region=$REGION#/modelaccess Then, set server configuration property Bedrock.api.key to your API key (ie, in your server.properties file)

Note: The AI services corresponding to the IDs in AntiqueWhite do not support vision requests.

Enabling AI

AI is disabled by default. To enable AI within your application, just set defaultEngineId to a different engine ID if you don't like the default, and then set disabled to false.

Here is sample Smart GWT code that enables AI using GPT-4.1:

  AI.setDefaultEngineId("gpt-4.1");
  AI.setDisabled(false);

Note: If your application will need to ask AI to analyze images, you'll need an AIEngine that supports vision requests. Check the table above to see which built-in engines support vision, or you can register your own (covered below).

AWS Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock is not a model in itself but a managed service that provides access to multiple foundation models through a single AWS API. Instead of interacting directly with a specific AI vendor (as you would with OpenAI or Gemini), you connect to Bedrock and select which underlying model to use; Bedrock supports many such models, including Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama, Amazon's own Titan engine, Deepseek, and others).

Therefore, Bedrock is an intermediary layer rather than the actual model provider. The most important thing about Bedrock integration into Smart GWT is that it gives you access to a wide selection of models from numerous different AI providers, without the need for native support for all those different providers. It also means that billing is done through your AWS account rather than directly with the company that is providing the underlying AI service.

Bedrock integration requies a couple of additional server.properties entries, in addition to the API key:

• Bedrock.api.aws.region Like other AWS services, Bedrock is a regional service, so we must connect to the endpoint of the region where you want the inference to run. Provide a valid AWS region in this property - for example us-east-2 or eu-central-1
• Bedrock.api.model As mentioned above, Bedrock itself is not an AI model, so you must provide the name of the model to use. This must be a valid modelId or ARN that you have access to through the AWS account associated with your API key. This is not a completely straightforward topic and you should consult AWS Bedrock documentation to work out the correct modelId or ARN to specify

Adding your own AIEngine

If the built-in AI Engines aren't enough, even with Bedrock support, you can implement your own for the generative AI service that you would like to use, and register it with the framework. You can then set your engine's ID into defaultEngineId.

You can also unregister an engine, or grab the AIEngine instance of a built-in or manually registered engine by passing the ID to AI.getEngine().

AI Component Views and AIServiceMode

AI can be used to set up the view settings of a ListGrid, such as filters, sorts, and record hilites, according to the user's natural-language request for how the records should be filtered, sorted, and hilited. These AI-generated view settings are saved in the component ViewState.

With each AI component view feature, there is an associated AIServiceMode setting that controls the mode for how AI should respond to user requests:

Filtering	filterViaAIMode
Sorting	sortViaAIMode
Hiliting	hiliteViaAIMode

With respect to AI component views, the supported AI service modes are:

• AI Assist - AI drives existing UI on the user's behalf according to the request. An example of this is: AI converts the user's description of what records they would like to see into AdvancedCriteria that is then set as the filter criterion of a DataBoundComponent.
• AIDE (AI Data Enhance) - per-record augmentation or enhancements provided via AI. Examples of this are AI-generated fields, where the field values are not derived from the records, but rather, supplied via AI.
• Hybrid - a combination of AI Assist and AIDE, where AI decides whether AI Assist, AIDE, or some combination of both approaches should be used to best respond to the request.

The amount of interaction with AI is lowest in AI Assist mode. AIDE requires more interaction with AI, and Hybrid mode requires the most amount of interaction. More interaction with AI generally requires more time to process the component view request.

Requirements for AI Component Views to be Enabled

With respect to a particular DataBoundComponent, the requirements for AI component views to be enabled are:

• AI must be enabled: AI.isEnabled()
• A globally-installed DataSource with a primary key and supporting AdvancedCriteria must be set.
• The DataSource cannot have a composite primary key.
• The number of data-records must be known, and the total number of records must be less than the DBC's aiMaxRecords.