Title: Connected agent doesn't receive uploaded file attachment — parent answers instead ("No steps were taken")
Hi all,
I have a multi-agent setup in Copilot Studio and I'm hitting a wall passing an uploaded document to a connected agent. Hoping someone has solved this.
ENVIRONMENT
- Copilot Studio, generative orchestration.
- Parent agent with two connected agents:
• QnA agent — answers policy questions from knowledge (text only).
• Document review agent — reviews an uploaded document (PDF/DOCX) and returns a structured report from its own knowledge.
- "Pass conversation history to this agent" is ON for both.
WHAT WORKS
- Text questions route to the QnA agent correctly. In the Activity map I can see the QnA child actually runs (Search sources / Knowledge, ~20s) and returns a grounded answer.
WHAT DOESN'T WORK
- When the user uploads a document and asks for a review, the parent routes to the Document review child, but in the Activity map the child shows "No steps were taken" (~0.9s) — it does nothing.
- Despite that, a "report" still appears — but it's written by the PARENT (it even cites the uploaded file as a source on unrelated turns), not by the document review child. The report format is paraphrased and it fabricates policy references that don't exist in the child's knowledge base.
MY DIAGNOSIS
It looks like the uploaded file (System.Activity.Attachments) is NOT passed across the parent → connected-agent boundary. Per the docs, a connected/child agent receives "a natural language task" + (optionally) conversation history + explicitly configured typed inputs — and there's no File variable type, so I can't see a way to hand the actual file to the child.
WHAT I'VE TRIED / CONSIDERED
1. Turning OFF "Use general knowledge" on the parent (to stop it fabricating).
2. Setting the child's "After running" to "Don't respond".
3. Removing the parent's own knowledge sources.
4. Considered adding an optional Record input on the child and binding System.Activity.Attachments via a topic "Redirect to agent" node (explicit input binding), but I'm not sure the child's review pipeline will treat a passed-in Record as "the document to review."
QUESTIONS
1. Is there ANY supported way to pass a user-uploaded file/attachment to a connected (or child) agent so the child can process it with its own knowledge?
2. Is "No steps were taken" on the child expected when only a natural-language task (no file) is passed?
3. Recommended pattern: should a document-review agent simply NOT be a connected agent, and instead be a standalone agent the user uploads to directly?
Any confirmation (works / doesn't / official limitation) or a working pattern would be hugely appreciated. Happy to share screenshots of the Activity map showing "No steps were taken" on the child vs the parent producing the answer.
Thanks!
