I found a solution to this based on another post and that was to do the following | ProcessState superState = (ProcessState) superDef.getNode("process-state1"); | superState.setSubProcessDefinition(subDef); | This seems realy yuk. If the parent process knows that it has a sub-process why can't it just load the definition. At the very least you could have the xml location as an attribute of the subProcess node. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4219714#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...