Hi Dan,
If you want to add a new persistence class to hibernate. you have to add it to the jbpm.execution.hbm.xml. Like this:
<subclass name="org.jbpm.pvm.internal.type.variable.BlobVariable" extends="org.jbpm.pvm.internal.type.Variable" discriminator-value="blob">
<many-to-one name="lob"
column="LOB_"
cascade="all"
foreign-key="FK_VAR_LOB"
index="IDX_VAR_LOB" />
</subclass>
Then hibernate could know to deal with your custom class type.
Then jbpm.variable.types.xml is used to convert different variable value to the related class type. and the jbpm.execution.hbm.xml is used to tell hibernate how to store these instances.