I've been doing some testing recently with the 5.1 snapshot of Drools (build 3280). The JPA state persistence in Drools Flow appears to be much more solid (no more NullPointerExceptions) - many thanks for this. One question I still have though is with the loading of existing sessions from the database; the loadStatefulKnowledgeSession method of class JPAKnowledgeServiceProviderImpl ultimately creates an instance of CommandBasedStatefulKnowledgeSession to encapsulate the session state. However, this class uses an anonymous local class for its work item manager. I would have expected JPAWorkItemManager to have been used instead, so that all the existing work items are also read back into memory from the database. Or am I missing something? As it is, I have to explicitly use an EntityManager to do this. Thanks, Alan

Kris, As far as I can see, JPAWorkItemManager isn't used. When loadStatefulKnowledgeSession is called in class JPAKnowledgeServiceProviderImpl, a new instance of CommandBasedStatefulKnowledgeSession is returned. If you look at the getWorkItemManager method of this class, it returns an instance of an anonymous local class - it doesn't appear to be reading the property to determine which work item manager factory to use. Thanks for looking at this, Alan Kris Verlaenen <kris.verlaenen(a)cs.kuleuven.be&gt; 26/08/2009 10:40 To Rules Users List <rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org&gt;, Alan.Gairey(a)tessella.com cc Subject Re: [rules-users] When is JPAWorkItemManager used in Drools Flow? Alan, The JPAWorkItemManager should be used instead (automatically) as it is defined in the session configuration properties (earlier in the same method): props.setProperty( "drools.workItemManagerFactory", "org.drools.persistence.processinstance.JPAWorkItemManagerFactory" ); Are you encountering problems where the JPAWorkItemManager is not being used? Kris Quoting Alan.Gairey(a)tessella.com: Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm