Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide > For Developers: Understanding How Workflow Processes Are Designed > Building Interactive Workflow Processes >

About Forward and Backward Navigation between Views

You can use synthetic events to define an interactive workflow process so that when the user clicks the Next and Back buttons, the user is taken to the next and previous views in the sequence without losing the context of the process instance.

NOTE:  Use synthetic events to allow the user to navigate backward through views. Run-time events allow forward navigation, but not backward navigation.

Workflows can navigate back and forth if the following conditions are met:

• The workflow being resumed is either an interactive workflow process or a 7.0 workflow process.
• The triggering event is a workflow navigation event, that is, an event with a name such as InvokeMethod, and a sub-event with a name such as FrameEventMethodWFBFxxxx or EventMethodWFBFxxxx, where "xxxx" is the name of the event, such as Next.

NOTE:  Free-flow (backward-forward) navigation is possible with interactive workflow processes and 7.0 workflow processes. Free-flow navigation is not possible with service workflows and long-running workflows. When considering whether to allow backward navigation in your workflow process, be aware of the following:

1. The backward navigation feature does not undo the effect of the workflow process; it only modifies the current step counter to point to a previous step.

2. The workflow configuration must make sure that the segment of the workflow that can be repeated by the backward navigation feature is idempotent.

For more information, see Creating Synthetic Event Buttons to Control User Navigation.