openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug] Honcho session ID validation fails for subagent/cron session keys (>100 chars) [1 comments, 2 participants]

Bug Summary

Subagent and cron-run session keys (format: agent:main:cron:<uuid>:run:<uuid>) exceed Honcho's 100-character session ID limit, causing all agent_end and before_compaction hook flushes to fail silently. This produces cascading symptoms: no message persistence to Honcho, compaction silently skipped, and session summaries not saved.

Environment

• OpenClaw: 2026.5.3-1
• Node.js: 22.22.2 (Linux)
• Honcho SDK: bundled with @honcho-ai/openclaw-honcho
• Session type: subagent isolated runs, cron agentTurn jobs

Root Cause

In @honcho-ai/openclaw-honcho/dist/helpers.js, buildSessionKey() concatenates sessionKey + '-' + messageProvider without a length check:

export function buildSessionKey(ctx) {
  const baseKey = ctx?.sessionKey ?? 'default';
  const provider = ctx?.messageProvider ?? 'unknown';
  const combined = `${baseKey}-${provider}`;
  return combined.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/g, '-');
}

Subagent session keys (e.g. agent:main:cron:49bb2b34-0f8c-440c-9222-131ef5944045:run:fb06425f-b1e1-4cd1-893d-2fd25836ac42) are ~107 chars. Honcho's SDK enforces a hard 100-char limit server-side (validation.js:144: .max(100, 'Session ID can be at most 100 characters')).

Observed Errors (71 occurrences in 16h)

[honcho] Failed to save messages to Honcho: [{ "origin": "string", "code": "too_big", "maximum": 100, "path": [], "message": "Session ID can be at most 100 characters" }]
[plugins] Failed to fetch Honcho context: [{ "code": "too_big", "maximum": 100, ... }]

Impact

1. No messages saved to Honcho for any subagent cron session
2. Compaction hooks silently fail → compactionCount stays 0 despite session age
3. Session summaries not persisted
4. EL time wasted on failing Zod parse/error log per failure

Suggested Fix

buildSessionKey() should truncate the baseKey to leave room for the provider suffix (~20 chars). Maximum baseKey length = 100 - max_provider_len - 1. Example fix:

export function buildSessionKey(ctx) {
  const baseKey = ctx?.sessionKey ?? 'default';
  const provider = ctx?.messageProvider ?? 'unknown';
  const combined = `${baseKey}-${provider}`;
  const sanitized = combined.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/g, '-');
  const maxBaseLen = 100 - Math.min(provider.length + 1, 20);
  return sanitized.length > 100
    ? sanitized.slice(0, maxBaseLen) + sanitized.slice(-(100 - maxBaseLen))
    : sanitized;
}

Workaround

None available to end users. This is a bundled dependency issue.