Keeping track of participants for previously completed activities?

Question

Looking for best practices for handling "rejection paths" in an approval process. Given a simple approval process:
1) Initiator submits item
2) Section mgr approves or rejects
3) Division approves or rejects
4) Office Mgr approves or rejects
5) user notified of final approval
My flow can be rejected at any step, where flow gets routed back to the previous step. But using roles, default behavior would put activity into inbox of ALL USERS in the Role. I want it to go back to the the specific user that completed the previous step.
It is starting to look like I need to store previous participants in database or create instance variables to store participants for every step....varInitiator, varSectionMgr, varDivMgr, varOfficeMgr so in case I need to route it backwords, I know who to actually send it to.
ideas?

Answer 1

for my scenario, you can use either of the following options:
1) after setting a participant, you can do:
"participant.sticky = true"
which makes the participant the default participant for the role, for each activity that lands in that role for that instance.
2) you can set the default participant for a role:
"role.defaultParticipantForCurrentInstance = this.creation.participant"