Good catch Martin.... so there was something 'strange' in the code, I just missed it... shame one me. A full client based assignment is (afaik) seldomly fount. In most of the situations the states (not to be confused with the state nodes) are either signalled by a human, or async after the execution of some action. When using async nodes, the token is 'known' to the code that signals the node again. That way it does not have to have knowledge about the processdefinition but just the one token that needs to be signalled. Kind of what happens with tasknodes where the tokens are 'known' in a task list and can be signalled without knowing the processdefinition Regarding the unit test, they avoid dealing with it.... Btw, Client based assignment only shows up on google for the jbpm 2.0 docs. Is that where you read it? (I cannot check the 3.x docs since I have no full access to the source here) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4131187#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...