# Response Model Defining LLM output schemas in Pydantic is done via `pydantic.BaseModel`. To learn more about models in Pydantic, check out their [documentation](https://docs.pydantic.dev/latest/concepts/models/). After defining a Pydantic model, we can use it as the `response_model` in your client `create` calls to OpenAI or any other supported model. The job of the `response_model` parameter is to: - Define the schema and prompts for the language model - Validate the response from the API - Return a Pydantic model instance. ## Prompting When defining a response model, we can use docstrings and field annotations to define the prompt that will be used to generate the response. ```python from pydantic import BaseModel, Field class User(BaseModel): """ This is the prompt that will be used to generate the response. Any instructions here will be passed to the language model. """ name: str = Field(description="The name of the user.") age: int = Field(description="The age of the user.") ``` Here all docstrings, types, and field annotations will be used to generate the prompt. The prompt will be generated by the `create` method of the client and will be used to generate the response. ## Optional Values If we use `Optional` and `default`, they will be considered not required when sent to the language model ```python from pydantic import BaseModel, Field from typing import Optional class User(BaseModel): name: str = Field(description="The name of the user.") age: int = Field(description="The age of the user.") email: Optional[str] = Field(description="The email of the user.", default=None) ``` ## Dynamic model creation There are some occasions where it is desirable to create a model using runtime information to specify the fields. For this, Pydantic provides the create_model function to allow models to be created on the fly: ```python from pydantic import BaseModel, create_model class FooModel(BaseModel): foo: str bar: int = 123 BarModel = create_model( 'BarModel', apple=(str, 'russet'), banana=(str, 'yellow'), __base__=FooModel, ) print(BarModel) #> print(BarModel.model_fields.keys()) #> dict_keys(['foo', 'bar', 'apple', 'banana']) ``` ??? notes "When would I use this?" Consider a situation where the model is dynamically defined, based on some configuration or database. For example, we could have a database table that stores the properties of a model for some model name or id. We could then query the database for the properties of the model and use that to create the model. ```sql SELECT property_name, property_type, description FROM prompt WHERE model_name = {model_name} ``` We can then use this information to create the model. ```python from pydantic import BaseModel, create_model from typing import List types = { 'string': str, 'integer': int, 'boolean': bool, 'number': float, 'List[str]': List[str], } # Mocked cursor.fetchall() cursor = [ ('name', 'string', 'The name of the user.'), ('age', 'integer', 'The age of the user.'), ('email', 'string', 'The email of the user.'), ] BarModel = create_model( 'User', **{ property_name: (types[property_type], description) for property_name, property_type, description in cursor }, __base__=BaseModel, ) print(BarModel.model_json_schema()) """ { 'properties': { 'name': {'default': 'The name of the user.', 'title': 'Name', 'type': 'string'}, 'age': {'default': 'The age of the user.', 'title': 'Age', 'type': 'integer'}, 'email': { 'default': 'The email of the user.', 'title': 'Email', 'type': 'string', }, }, 'title': 'User', 'type': 'object', } """ ``` This would be useful when different users have different descriptions for the same model. We can use the same model but have different prompts for each user. ## Adding Behavior We can add methods to our Pydantic models, just as any plain Python class. We might want to do this to add some custom logic to our models. ```python from pydantic import BaseModel from typing import Literal from openai import OpenAI import instructor client = instructor.patch(OpenAI()) class SearchQuery(BaseModel): query: str query_type: Literal["web", "image", "video"] def execute(self): print(f"Searching for {self.query} of type {self.query_type}") #> Searching for cat of type image return "Results for cat" query = client.chat.completions.create( model="gpt-3.5-turbo", messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Search for a picture of a cat"}], response_model=SearchQuery, ) results = query.execute() print(results) #> Results for cat ``` Now we can call `execute` on our model instance after extracting it from a language model. If you want to see more examples of this checkout our post on [RAG is more than embeddings](../blog/posts/rag-and-beyond.md)