IMS conversational processing

You can write conversational programs to perform conversational processing with IMS Transaction Manager.

The difference between a conversational and nonconversational program is:

Conversational program: A message processing program (MPP) that processes transactions made up of several steps. It does not process the entire transaction at the same time. A conversational program divides processing into a connected series of terminal-to-program-to-terminal interactions. You use conversational processing when one transaction contains several parts.
Nonconversational program: A message processing program that receives a message from a terminal, processes the request, and sends a message back to the terminal. A conversational program receives a message from a terminal, and replies to the terminal, but saves the data from the transaction in a scratchpad area (SPA). Then, when the person at the terminal enters more data, the program has the data it saved from the last message in the SPA, so it can continue processing the request without the person at the terminal having to enter the data again.