Thanks for your reply. I basically need it because I am not building my processes into jbpm from scratch, instead i am trying to incorporate it into an existing monolithic app. Since the Front end already exists, being able to query tasks based on their vraiables would allow me to make an incremental change and use the same UI to fetch certian types of tasks.
From you comment about all that being serialized it seems, I might need to just do this in filtering in the app itself. Hopefully scale wont be an issue.