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Feature Request: Public API to initialize Chat with history #819
Description
Currently, the Chat API in google-genai (Java SDK) does not expose a way to initialize a Chat session with an existing history of messages (e.g., loaded from persistent storage).
When reloading a session from disk (e.g. JSON/YAML), developers currently have to work around this limitation by either:
- Re-sending all previous messages to the model, which is slow and consumes tokens.
- Using reflection to manually populate the private
comprehensiveHistoryandcuratedHistoryfields inChatBase, which is fragile and not recommended.
It would be very beneficial to have a public API (e.g., an overload of Chats.create() or a builder method) that accepts an initial List<Content> to restore the conversation state.
Activity
hemasekhar-p commentedon Feb 11, 2026
Hi @vorburger, Thanks for raising this Feature request. After reviewing the current java-genai SDK documentation and source code, there is no public API available to initialize a Chat instance with pre-existing history. we'll be filing a feature request to track this internally.
vorburger commentedon Oct 4, 2026
This might not actually be required anymore with the Interactions API... I'm looking into whether I'll close this.
@hemasekhar-p do you want to assign this issue to me?
vorburger commentedon Oct 8, 2026
With the move to the Interactions API, this isn't really required anymore; I'm therefore closing this.