What Data for This Category Looks Like
Market and yield data for steel trade comes primarily from domestic steel spot trading platforms, futures exchange market data APIs, and publicly available industry association data. Two update schedules apply: Spot data updates daily after 16:00 with that day’s closing price and trading volume. Futures data refreshes every 5 minutes with the latest transaction price. Individual data documents are grouped by steel product category, and include fields for origin, specification model, current day’s transaction price, previous day’s transaction price, current day’s trading volume, and procurement cost and circulation cost fields required for benchmark yield calculation. Price units are yuan per ton, trading volume units are tons, and yield fields are derived values calculated based on price differences and costs.
Constraints on Tool Calling and Plugin Workflows
Steel trade market and yield data sources are scattered, and update schedules differ significantly. Tool calling must adapt to different authentication rules and return formats of spot trading platforms and futures exchanges, and handle timestamp alignment logic for the two data sources. The document structure grouped by product category requires tool calling components to accept steel specification and origin as filter parameters, to avoid returning redundant data beyond required needs. Yield calculation logic that includes custom fields such as procurement cost and circulation cost requires plugins to accept custom business parameters to complete yield calculations. The timeliness of daily data requires tool calling to set a reasonable timeout threshold, to prevent task failure due to delayed data updates.
Configuration Settings
| Configuration Item | Suggested Value | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
tool_call_timeout | 300 seconds | Steel spot data complete dataset is available within 10 minutes after daily update. The timeout setting covers the full workflow of data pulling, format conversion, and yield calculation |
tool_call_max_retries | 2 times | Addresses temporary network fluctuations or rate limiting from market data APIs that cause call failures, prevents task termination from a single failed call |
mcp_tool_filter_fields | ["product_type","origin","specification","current_day_price","previous_day_price","trading_volume"] | Only retains core fields required for yield calculation, reduces data transmission and parsing overhead |
plugin_custom_params_enabled | Enabled | Requires passing business-specific parameters such as procurement cost and circulation cost to complete yield calculations, adapts to personalized business logic for steel trade |
tool_auth_type | api_key | Steel industry market data APIs generally use API key authentication, adapts to access requirements for most public data sources |
The parameter values provided on this page are common starting points for configuration. Actual values are affected by material form, data volume, and business rules. Each scenario requires individual analysis. It is recommended to test on your own samples before finalizing settings.
Three Common Mistakes
- Symptom: Empty result returned when calling an MCP market data tool via the tool calling component. Cause: The
product_typeparameter required by the tool was not correctly bound to the steel product category from user input, causing the API to fail to match the corresponding data source. - Symptom: MongoDB compatibility error is prompted when saving plugin configuration, error code is
MongoServerError: The dollar ($) p. Cause: When using FastGPT beta4 version, the custom parameter key name in plugin configuration contains the$symbol, which conflicts with MongoDB reserved characters. - Symptom: Error reporting failure to load external resources appears in tool calling logs. Cause: The automatic image loading switch in tool calling was not turned off. The steel market data API does not return image resources, causing loading failure.
How to Confirm Proper Configuration
- In the FastGPT tool debugging panel, manually pass in the specified steel product category and origin parameters, call the tool, and check if the returned fields match the configured filter fields.
- View the authentication information in the plugin configuration, confirm that the API key for the market data API has been correctly bound, and that the authentication method matches the requirements of the data source.
- Trigger a complete yield calculation workflow, check that the tool calling timeout logs are within the preset threshold, and there are no retry failure records.
- Verify the incoming logic of custom parameters, confirm that fields such as procurement cost and circulation cost have been correctly passed to the plugin's calculation logic.
Question material comes from public community discussions. Configuration values are common starting points and should be measured against your own samples. Verified on 2026-09-14.