Files & attachments

The Compass Chat composer takes attachments three ways: the paperclip button, dragging files onto the composer, or pasting from the clipboard. Attach several at once; each shows as a chip on the message.

Supported: images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP), PDFs, and text files (plain text, Markdown, CSV, JSON), up to 20 MB each.

Chat input always carries an optional attachments list alongside the message, so anything you run conversationally — an agent, a workflow, a tool — can receive the files without any special wiring.

To build work that takes files, use the File field type in the schema editor — on an agent's object input, or on a workflow's Input node. A field can be a single File or a list of File, and file fields can sit anywhere in the shape, including inside nested objects.

A workflow's input defaults to chat — a message plus optional attachments — which is why deployed work is file-ready in Compass Chat out of the box. Switch the input to object mode when you want named, typed fields instead, and add File fields where you need them.

File is an input-side type: agents and workflows take files in; they don't produce them as output. (Components can — see below.)

In the mapper, a file field binds as a single opaque reference: pick the source that carries the file, and you're done. Sources that carry files read as file (or file[] for lists). There's nothing to type — no paths, no storage keys — so there's nothing to get wrong.

When an agent runs with attachments, the files are handed to the model as native content — images as vision input, PDFs and text as documents — along with a manifest of what's attached. The runtime fetches the bytes itself and passes the content to the model directly; files are never exposed as public links.

When the agent hands work to a tool — a workflow, another agent, or a component like the Document Splitter — file parameters are offered to the model by name: it picks which attached file to pass, and the platform routes the actual file underneath. The model never invents storage paths, and this works at any nesting depth.

Every step a file flowed through wears a paperclip in the execution trace. The input step lists what entered the run, agent steps show a Files section with the attachments they saw, and tool calls render file chips inline in their inputs and outputs — so you can follow a file from the moment it was attached to the exact step that used it.

Uploads land in Compass's own object storage, scoped to your project. They're working data, not an archive: attachments are kept for 30 days, and deleting a conversation removes its attachments immediately. Compass surfaces show file names and metadata — the bytes themselves only ever travel to the model. If an old execution references a file that has since expired, the file is simply skipped; it never fails the run.