LCEL lets us apply transformations on the input and output data through its life-cycle.

Sometimes we want to pass input data to a chain without a pre-processing while also using a retriever to acquire the context. This is where RunnablePassthrough comes in.

from langchain_community.vectorstores import FAISS
from langchain_core.output_parsers import StrOutputParser
from langchain_core.prompts import ChatPromptTemplate
from langchain_core.runnables import RunnablePassthrough
from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI, OpenAIEmbeddings

vectorstore = FAISS.from_texts(
    ["harrison worked at kensho"], embedding=OpenAIEmbeddings()
)
retriever = vectorstore.as_retriever()
template = """Answer the question based only on the following context:
{context}

Question: {question}
"""
prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_template(template)
model = ChatOpenAI()

retrieval_chain = (
    {"context": retriever, "question": RunnablePassthrough()}
    | prompt
    | model
    | StrOutputParser()
)

retrieval_chain.invoke("where did harrison work?")