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Atoti Intelligence SDK

This is part of the Atoti Intelligence SDK offer.
This guide explains how to connect an Atoti Java application to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers of other Atoti Server instances, so that it uses their tools as its own. For what a connection then provides (the authentication modes, identity propagation, remote tool naming, getConnectedServers, and resilience), see How connecting to other MCP Servers works.

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Prerequisites

  • An Atoti Java project with the Atoti MCP Server already set up; see How to set up the Atoti MCP Server
  • A license including the Atoti Intelligence Extension tier, which itself requires Essentials

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How to declare a connection

Declare a connection under spring.ai.mcp.client.streamable-http.connections.<name>. Everything about it goes on that one node. url and endpoint are Spring AI’s own properties, documented in the Spring AI MCP Client Boot Starter reference. authentication is Atoti’s own property. Below, pnl-server is a peer Atoti Server in the same deployment, authenticating with a token minted for the calling user. sandbox is an unsecured local server used during development: it names no authentication mode, so it sends no credential.
See Which authentication modes are available? for what each authentication value sends and when to choose it.
A connection accepts url, authentication, and endpoint, and nothing else. Any other key is flagged by the IDE as it is typed, and refused at startup with the connection and the offending key named. A misspelled authentication would otherwise bind to nothing, leaving the connection silently on none. On the wire, that looks exactly like a remote server refusing a correct credential.authentication belongs to the HTTP transports only. A connection declared under spring.ai.mcp.client.stdio.connections runs a local process and identifies itself by being that process. Writing authentication on one is refused at startup rather than ignored.
Streamable HTTP is the only transport Atoti supports for an outbound connection. The server-sent events transport is deprecated for removal in Spring AI 2.0.0. Declare every connection under spring.ai.mcp.client.streamable-http.connections. Set no spring.ai.mcp.server.protocol on the servers being connected to, which leaves them on Streamable HTTP.A connection declared under spring.ai.mcp.client.sse.connections is reported at startup as unsupported and gets none of the documented behavior. Its calls carry no credential whatever authentication says, and it is absent from getConnectedServers. Spring AI still builds a client for it, so nothing else says anything is wrong.

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How to authenticate with atoti-jwt

An atoti-jwt connection mints a token accepted by every server sharing the deployment’s signing key. Both servers must be configured with the same atoti.jwt.key. Against a session started from the Atoti Python SDK, the same key pair must be passed to that session; see Connect to other MCP Servers in Python.
Declaring a connection states where a server is, never that it belongs to this deployment. Choose atoti-jwt only for servers under the same ownership.

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Which other properties and beans matter?

Two properties are deliberately not needed. Spring AI’s own spring.ai.mcp.server.expose-mcp-client-tools is a different mechanism: it publishes one fixed tool list assembled while the application starts, before any user has authenticated. It would therefore need a service account to enumerate the peers, and would then show every client that one account’s list. Leave it unset.Remote tools are reported on this server’s MCP endpoint over Streamable HTTP, the default. An application that switches its endpoint to the deprecated SSE transport with spring.ai.mcp.server.protocol=SSE keeps a working endpoint and its own tools, but not the remote ones.A chat run that carries no address reports its entry with no url rather than with an invented one. This happens only when the chatExecutor bean is replaced with one that does not propagate the address.