Conversational programs

An IMS program can support a transaction that is composed of one interaction or multiple interactions. A transaction with multiple iterations is referred to as a conversational transaction.

An IMS conversational program is intended to process more complex transactions that take multiple interactions to complete. Each interaction is known as an iteration of the conversation. An IMS conversational program divides the complex processing into a connected series of client-to-program-to-client interactions that are known as iterations. In each iteration of a conversation, the IMS conversational transaction program receives a request message from the client, processes that request, and sends a reply to the client. The program also saves any intermediate data from the transaction in the scratchpad area (SPA) to be used in the next iteration of the conversation. The user can modify the data in the reply, or enter additional data and then send in the request to IMS to process the next iteration of the conversation. Using the data in this new request along with any data in the SPA from the last iteration, the IMS conversational program will process the next iteration of the conversation. The processing of these iterations continues until the conversation is ended either by the client application or by IMS.