Obviously, this is an undocumented feature so I could be wrong here but: The conversation element is for business conversation Ids, so you can define the conversation Id based on a context variable. You can also use the conversation element to define a conversation parameter definition and then refer to it by name. i.e. | <conversation name="widgetConv" param-name="widgetId" param-value="#{widget.id}"/> | | | <page view-id="widgetEdit.xhtml" conversation="widgetConv"> | ... | ... | </page> | | If you navigate to widgetEdit, it will find the value for #{widget} and use the id attribute as the conversation Id. If you try to open two instances of the same widgetEdit page for the same widget (and hence the widget.id value is the same), rather than try and start a new conversation with the same Id, it will automatically switch to the existing conversation. I imagine the child conversation element is so you can define the conversation business Id for that page without needing to define it outside of the page and referring to it by name from the page element. Curious how that works when its a new widget and it has no Id? For more information look in the docs at the Id parameter in the @Begin annotation. This has now been deprecated in 2.0 Beta 1, but it might still be in the docs, and probably referenced in the java docs. It is very likely to be in the 1.2.1 docs. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4060221#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...