Publishing a catalog

Status: Current | Last reviewed: 2026-08-12

A catalog is a versioned bundle of UI components your agents render to users via A2UI. You publish a catalog so agents and workflows in your tenant can pick from it. Same as agent versions, you iterate as drafts and publish when ready.

What lives in a catalog

A catalog contains:

Catalogs are tenant-scoped and fully editable by your tenant. Every new tenant starts with its own editable copies of two baseline catalogs — Cross-Industry (common-extended) and Standard Primitives — cloned from the platform's curated set. You own these copies outright: edit, publish, and version them independently without affecting any other tenant. Additional industry catalogs (Healthcare, Insurance, and so on) can be brought into your tenant on request.

Standard Primitives holds the basic building blocks every visual response is assembled from — text, buttons, cards, rows and columns, input fields. Your tenant's copy is loaded automatically for any stage with Multimodal UI enabled, whether or not you select it, so an agent that picks only an industry catalog still renders correctly. Keep this catalog published: it's what your other catalogs' components sit inside.

Find your catalogs

Open Tools & Templates from the sidebar and select the Multimodal tab. The Catalogs sub-tab lists every catalog in your tenant; the Components sub-tab lets you preview published components with pagination across the catalog set, and External endpoints exposes catalogs to third-party voice platforms. Click a catalog to open its detail page under Tools & Templates, where the Catalogs link returns to the listing.

The old Settings → Multimodal link still works — it redirects here.

Author the catalog

Catalogs are authored in the code-server — a full VS Code in your browser, scoped to the catalog's source. From the catalog detail page, click Open in code-server.

Test in the preview pane

The catalog editor's preview pane renders any component against any sample payload. Click a component on the left, pick a payload from the dropdown, and the preview updates as you type.

The preview talks to the same renderer your agents use, so what you see is what users will get.

Interactive components should acknowledge an action where it happens. For example, Photo Capture Widget provides separate Camera and Upload file choices for every slot. Camera opens a live preview before capture. When submitted, the widget changes its button to Uploading… while it stores the files, confirms Photos uploaded, and prevents another upload after success. If storage or delivery fails, it shows the error and changes the button to Try upload again. Use named required-photo labels when every shot is mandatory; otherwise set the maximum number of photos and the widget shows generic selectable slots. Check these states in preview before publishing, not just the component's initial appearance.

Publish

When the catalog is ready:

  1. From the catalog detail page, click Publish.
  2. Add a release note ("Added insurance-claim form", "New brand colors").
  3. Confirm.

The publish step:

Note: Catalog source is archived alongside the build artifact so you can recover it even if the workspace volume is lost. Restore via ⋯ → Restore source on any past version.

Pin or float

Agents and workflows can either pin to a specific catalog version or float on "latest." Pin for production stability; float for catalogs you're iterating on rapidly. The pin is set on each consumer, not on the catalog.

Only published catalogs with a current bundle appear in agent and workflow pickers. Draft catalogs stay editable in Tools & Templates, but they cannot be selected for runtime rendering until published.

Multiple catalogs

You can have many catalogs in a tenant — one per brand, one per use case, one for staging. The picker on each agent/workflow chooses which catalog to render from. Most tenants get away with one or two.

Export and import (sharing between tenants or instances)

To move a catalog to another tenant or another TrueServe instance, export it as a signed bundle and import it on the other side.

  1. From the catalog detail page, click ⋯ → Export. You get a downloadable .zip (or .tgz) of the selected version, signed so the destination can verify it came from a trusted source.
  2. On the destination, use Import catalog and choose the file. If a catalog with the same name already exists, the import adds the bundled version to it; if not, enable Create if missing and the import creates a new catalog in your tenant and makes the imported version current.

The imported catalog renders immediately, but to edit its source you'll re-publish it once from your tenant — the bundle ships the runnable build, not the full editable source tree.

See also