An HTML client user enters into a dialog with the toolkit. This dialog consists of navigating through Web pages that are presented according to the business process that is being carried out. Business processes are expressed as toolkit Single Action EJB, BPEL, Operation Step or as state machines that follow the application's business logic.

The simplest dialog and navigation is to request static informational pages using HTML hyperlinks. Dialogs that require dynamically generated Web pages use more sophisticated navigational control. You have the following navigation options:

HTML hyperlinks support linking one HTML page to another. This is suitable for informational pages that do not need to be dynamically generated.

Simple toolkit operations with Single Action EJB are suitable for simple transactions that do not require the persistence of an intermediate state. For example, a transfer of funds between accounts could be done with a form request page that runs an operation, which in turn causes a confirmation page to be returned to the client. No dialog control is needed in this case. See Single action EJB.

When a process requires the submission of several form pages from the HTML client to gather the required data, a flow processor can be used to keep track of the state of the user's interaction with the toolkit. Each time the user interacts with the toolkit, the flow processor is called and, according to its current state, it invokes the process for creating the response page to send back to the client. As the user interacts with the toolkit, the flow processor changes states according to its definition. The user experiences this process as a navigation through a series of Web pages.