🐞 Bug Summary

The tags query parameter in the /tools endpoint does not work after the schema change from List[str] to List[Dict[str, str]]. The tag filtering logic compares plain strings against dictionary objects, which always fails. Attempting to filter tools by tag either returns a 500 Internal Server Error (database path) or returns 0 results (in-memory path), even when matching tools exist.

🧩 Affected Component

Select the area of the project impacted:

• mcpgateway - API
• mcpgateway - UI (admin panel)
• mcpgateway.wrapper - stdio wrapper
• Federation or Transports
• CLI, Makefiles, or shell scripts
• Container setup (Docker/Podman/Compose)
• Other (explain below)

🔁 Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a tool with tags in the new dict format:

   [{"id": "automation", "label": "automation"}, {"id": "data-analysis", "label": "data-analysis"}]

2. Attempt to filter tools using the tags query parameter:

   GET /tools?tags=automation
   

   Result: 500 Internal Server Error

3. Attempt to filter using visibility parameter (triggers in-memory filter path):

   GET /tools?visibility=public&tags=automation
   

   Result: Returns 0 tools, even though tools with automation tag exist

4. Verify tools exist without the tag filter:

   GET /tools?include_inactive=true
   

   Result: Returns all tools including those with automation tag

🤔 Expected Behavior

The API should return all tools that have a tag with id or label matching the provided filter value. For example, GET /tools?tags=automation should return all tools where any tag dict has "id": "automation" or "label": "automation".

📓 Logs / Error Output

Path 1 - Database filter (500 error):
When calling GET /tools?tags=automation, the json_contains_expr function in sqlalchemy_modifier.py fails because it's designed for plain string arrays (["automation"]) but the tags column now contains dict arrays ([{"id": "automation", "label": "automation"}]).

Path 2 (0 results):
When calling GET /tools?visibility=public&tags=automation, the filtering logic at main.py:2587 performs:

any(tag in tool.tags for tag in tags_list)

This checks if string "automation" is in the list [{"id": "automation", ...}], which evaluates to False because string equality against dict objects never matches.

🧠 Environment Info

🧩 Additional Context (optional)

Affected files:

• mcpgateway/main.py

Schema change reference:

• Migration: 9e028ecf59c4_tag_records_changes_list_str_to_list_.py
• Tags changed from List[str] to List[Dict[str, str]] with format {"id": "<tag>", "label": "<tag>"}

Related: The same issue likely affects tag filtering in other entity list endpoints (resources, prompts, servers, gateways, a2a_agents) that use the same tag filtering pattern.