NOREF: Conversation storage updates

[jackiequach]

SCHOL-453

Describe your changes

Frontend

• Updates to send single message in the payload for the /chat request.
• Updates /chat header to forward session cookie.

Backend

• add agents sdk sqlalchemy session https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/sessions/sqlalchemy_session/
• set up async sqlalchemy session to not share connections btw event loops
• convert update chat into async container (this allows the natively async agents SDK methods/functions to be used seamlessly in this container)
• make timer async compatible
• Adds require_session_jwt decorator that reads the session cookie on each request, verifies the JWT, or issues a new signed session on first visit.
• Adds session_jwt.py with helper methods to sign and verify sessions.

How to test

Will require updates to end to end smoke tests @jdohan

Frontend/End-to-end

Run the backend locally pointing to the prod db:

cd etl-pipeline
STAGE="development" LOG_LEVEL="debug" DRB_API_HOST=localhost python main.py -p APIProcess -e production

Run the frontend:

cd web
npm run dev

Go to localhost:3000/research-assistant
Send a message and ensure the vraSessionId is created in the browser's session storage.

Check the agent_messages table to make sure the messages associated with the test session ID and agent_sessions

Backend only

from api.assistant.agent import  update_chat
import asyncio

message='I am interested in the nile river'
conversation_type='catalogSearch'
session_id='test'
edition_id = None

r = asyncio.run(update_chat(message, conversation_type=conversation_type, edition_id=edition_id, session_id=session_id))

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
digital-research-books	Ready	Preview, Comment	Mar 27, 2026 6:34pm

[jackiequach]

Playwright tests will fail on this PR since the backend changes are not yet available on the QA env.

[alea12]

@jackiequach could you please resolve the conflicts?