Re: hibernate question ?

From:

Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:43:07 -0400

Message-ID:

<i5dkko$31v$1@news.albasani.net>

(Just because I elided tom's other comments doesn't mean they aren't
worthwhile, but these last summarize.)

Lew wrote:

I remain dubious about the value of preventing null in the retrieved
value. None of the other values are thus guarded. With any
non-primitive entity attribute, and that's nearly all entity
attributes, you have to check for possible 'null' values if the
corresponding data store might contain NULL.

Tom Anderson wrote:

If it's a collection, i don't think it can be null (unless you're
storing it as a serialized object rather than a database-mapped
collection), since there is no actual column holding its value - rather,
there are backreference columns in contained objects. Those could be
null, but that just means those objects aren't in any collection. If no
object is contained in the collection, won't Hibernate make it an empty
collection, rather than null?

Your comments addressed my puzzlement perfectly. You've given me some things
to test. Thanks, tom.

--
Lew