The session-managed model, especially with clients bound to ABL sessions, is specifically designed for business applications or SOAP Web services that support a single transaction across multiple requests from the same client, returning intermediate results with each request until the transaction is completed. Thus, the PAS for OpenEdge instance maintains context between requests for each client that it services, and each such client participates in a persistent connection to the application server. Any bound ABL session is dedicated to serving that one client until the binding between them is unbound.

In this application model, all client requests are single-threaded, meaning that the application server does not handle another request from the same client until it has completed and responded to any pending request from that client.