Skip to main content

Structured output with Ollama

I talked about Structured Output before in the context of Semantic Kernel. Structured Outputs is a feature that ensures the model will always generate responses that follow a supplied JSON Schema, so you can process the responses in automated fashion without worrying about getting invalid JSON back.

Recently support for Structured Output was announced by Ollama. In this post I want to show you how you can use this in combination with OllamaSharp, the C# client for Ollama.

Using Structured Ouput in OllamaSharp

Remark: Make sure you have latest Ollama version running on your local machine before you continue.

  • Add the OllamaSharp client to your project:

dotnet add package OllamaSharp

  • Now let’s first define our response model:
  • Afterwards we need to initiate a new OllamaSharp client instance:
  • We create a new request object.
    • Notice that we specify a JSON schema object based on the Recipe model we created earlier
  • If we now invoke the application we get a JSON response back in the provided format:

The full example can be found here: wullemsb/SemanticKernelStructuredOutput at OllamaClient

What about using the Semantic Kernel Ollama connector?

At the moment of writing this blog post, I couldn’t get the Structured Output working when combining Semantic Kernel and Ollama.

I explicitly referenced the correct OllamaSharp version:

And used the Ollama connector:

But when calling the api, I still got a response back in an unstructured format:

More information

Semantic Kernel - Structured output

awaescher/OllamaSharp: The easiest way to use the Ollama API in .NET

Support for 'Structured outputs' · awaescher/OllamaSharp · Discussion #152

Structured outputs · Ollama Blog

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more