What the documents look like
Brand-owned stores are staffed and accounted for directly by the brand, so order fulfilment and after-sales answers draw on the store's own systems rather than a franchise contract. The working materials are daily sales reports, shift schedules, display photographs and inventory transfer orders, updated daily or weekly and tied to sales target tracking, size-gap handling and store performance accounting. Citation tracing addresses one question: when a customer asks about order status, return or exchange conditions, or transfer progress, can the original material behind the answer be located, checked and confirmed as the effective version?
A brand-owned store operations team keeps a document titled East China Brand-owned Store Transfer and After-sales Wording for store managers to cite during order fulfilment and after-sales answers. Paragraph 3 reads: "Store A submitted transfer order T-0310 on 10 March 2025, moving 5 spring coats from Store A to Store B. The transfer order status is 'regional manager has signed, awaiting ERP inventory posting'. Before ERP completes posting, Store B may not commit to customers that this batch is sellable." A draft sentence under review reads: "Store B has received the 5 spring coats and can accept customer reservations." The draft and the source differ on two fields: whether posting is complete, and whether sellability may be committed.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that share the same vector model. Bases on different vector models cannot be associated together; check the identifier first and exclude those that do not match, rather than running a cross-model search to compare missed recalls. The node outputs cited content as an array, and the length may be 0; an empty array does not mean the workflow has errored or stopped. The citation limit is controlled in tokens. The minimum relevance value takes effect only under semantic search or when result reranking is used, and it is a filter threshold that does not perform permission or entity isolation. Retrieval is retrieval and authorization is authorization; a retrieved result does not confirm permission for a specific order, store or action.
The optional paths in the overall retrieval flow are not all executed on every request. Image retrieval requires a corresponding image input and model capability. Reranking requires a rerank model enabled under the settings. Mixed retrieval combines semantic and full-text recall through RRF, which is a fusion step in the pipeline rather than a switch. The thinking budget is a reasoning budget and does not serve as the citation token limit.
Configuration and implementation checks
The following settings relate to the sample above and to this feature and task only. The values are starting points for this hypothetical trial, used to compare against the status fields in the sample source.
| Configuration item | Hypothetical trial starting point | Reason and comparison object |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge base | Associate only the base holding East China Brand-owned Store Transfer and After-sales Wording | Check the selected base's vector model identifier first; associate only when it matches the version the sample requires |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | The sample contains order number T-0310 and status phrases; full-text recall can match the number, semantic recall can match the status description |
| Citation limit | Set to 600 tokens | The sample paragraph is about 120 Chinese characters; 600 tokens can hold the paragraph and adjacent text; compare against the paragraph length |
| Minimum relevance | Set to 0.5 | Used to filter low-relevance fragments; this value does not exclude unrelated business records, and permission isolation requires a separate system implementation |
| Question optimization | Not enabled for now | The sample question has a complete subject; enabling it adds one model call; compare against whether the question contains references |
| Result reranking | Not enabled for now | The sample candidate range is small; enabling reranking requires a rerank model enabled under the settings; compare against candidate count |
Three common errors
- Treating a signed transfer order as completed posting. The sample source states "regional manager has signed, awaiting ERP inventory posting", so signing and posting are two different facts. If the draft says "Store B has received the goods", the input is that source sentence, the comparison object is whether posting is complete, and the observable result is that the source does not state posting is complete, so the draft is not supported.
- Treating a retrieval hit as authorized execution. The search node returns a citation array, and that array only indicates relevant content was retrieved; it does not indicate Store B is authorized to commit sellability. The input is the retrieval output, the comparison object is the source line "before ERP completes posting, Store B may not commit to customers", and the observable result is that the retrieval action itself does not change the authorization state.
- Treating an empty citation array as workflow failure. The official document states the cited content length may be 0, and an empty array does not mean an error termination. If a paper input of
[]is used to check the downstream design, the input is the empty array, the comparison object is whether the downstream node continues execution, and the observable result is whether the downstream design branches for the empty array.
How to verify the setup
- Source text check. Input: paragraph 3 of the sample source. Compare: "regional manager has signed, awaiting ERP inventory posting" in the source against the draft "Store B has received the 5 spring coats and can accept customer reservations". Observe: the source does not state posting is complete, so the draft is not supported on the posting-complete field and should be returned for additional evidence.
- Citation output handoff check. Input: the citation array returned by the knowledge base search node. Compare: whether each citation in the array points to the document and version holding the sample source. Observe: if the array length is greater than 0 and the entries can be located to that document, the citation handoff holds; if the array length is 0, record the gap and do not judge it as an error.
- Document currency check. Input: the current and historical versions of the sample document. Compare: the value of the transfer order status field in both versions. Observe: if the current and historical versions take mutually exclusive values on the same field, confirm which version is effective; if the historical version does not state that field, record it as unsupported rather than treating it as a conflict.