Our team has been building workflows and we continue to encounter an error that completely trashes our workflow definition and makes us have to start over. The error seems to occur if an assignment variable although it seems to be defined in the task form. The workflow should come up with errors but instead we can with the following displayed:

Could not open requested business process due to processing errors.
Empty process was loaded instead.
Click on the Details tab below to view error details.

How do we recover from this situation - it happens repeatably. I am pretty sure I have the variable out_request defined as an assignment on the task but even if I didn't it should not stop the process modeler from being displayed. We should receive an error if the workflow has issues when we attempt to save it - however we are allowed to saved it and the workflow then becomes unrecoverable. Also notice some instability in the repository were it becomes corrupted and the process explorer is no longer viewable - we will try to recreate this issue - below is the exception that occurs when the workflow is corrupted:

java.lang.Exception: org.eclipse.emf.ecore.resource.Resource$IOWrappedException: Unresolved reference 'out_request'. (inputStream://dummyUriWithValidSuffix.xml, 29, 55)
at org.jbpm.designer.web.profile.impl.JbpmProfileImpl.getDefinitions(JbpmProfileImpl.java:318)
at org.jbpm.designer.web.profile.impl.JbpmProfileImpl$2.parseModel(JbpmProfileImpl.java:245)
at org.jbpm.designer.web.repository.impl.UUIDBasedJbpmRepository.load(UUIDBasedJbpmRepository.java:37)
at org.jbpm.designer.web.server.UUIDBasedRepositoryServlet.doGet(UUIDBasedRepositoryServlet.java:116)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:734)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:847)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:329)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:248)
at org.jboss.weld.servlet.ConversationPropagationFilter.doFilter(ConversationPropagationFilter.java:62)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:280)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:248)
at org.jboss.solder.servlet.exception.CatchExceptionFilter.doFilter(CatchExceptionFilter.java:65)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:280)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:248)