yeah, so everything was working fine with the unit tests (transactions are not being simulated perfectly apparently), as in the actual web app there is a problem with the jBPM perfectly recognizing the "hibernateable" types and doing the right thing. Long story short, my domain class is serializable, so there is a problem as hibernate updates the serialized instance, not the instance in the domain model. As I work through this I'll post an update... seee the reference guide 10.6 for more information... I'm working with customizing the variable instance mapping to get the engine to correctly recognize my type and "do the right thing", where the "right thing" is what is intuitive... more on this one later - and yes, I'm going to dig into the source to figure out what's going on. That is one thing about jBPM - the source is nice and clean - easy to get set up in eclipse and get a debugger going quite quickly so it's easy to figure out what's going on at the very least :) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3967671#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...