Interactions and activities

An interaction is a customer contact achieved through communication such as a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or a received document. Any of these contact methods initiates the interaction to perform one or many activities to meet the need of the customer.

The Interaction Framework provides the flexibility for a solution to manage one interaction or many interactions simultaneously. The framework creates a data table to store the interaction context values. A user may have several interactions opened at the same time, but can work on only one interaction at a time. Compare this situation to your computer desktop: you may have several applications open and running at the same time, but you can work in only one of the applications at a time.

Once an interaction starts in any project in the framework, all other projects in the framework can complete work or activities for the interaction. Activities run with the same logic. Once an activity starts in one framework project, the activity can complete in any framework project, including the one in which it started.

You must start or initialize an interaction first to complete any associated activities so that the framework can communicate the success or failure of the process across the projects. Once all activities are completed and the customer contact has ended, stop or close the interaction to remove the interaction's context values from the data table.