Fundamental question: Why aren't @Embedded objects always instantiated?
The interesting observation is that Ebean does not instantiate @Embedded objects if those do not contain basic datatypes (int, boolean...) or weren't touched before. Example:
@Entity
public class Embedder {
// getNotAutoInstantiated() will return null if this field was not touched before
@Embedded
private NotAutoInstantiated notAutoInstantiated = new NotAutoInstantiated();
// getAutoInstantiated() will always return an instance!
@Embedded
private AutoInstantiated autoInstantiated = new AutoInstantiated();
}
@Embeddable
public class AutoInstantiated {
// theKey is why this embedded object is always instantiated
private int theKey;
private String field1;
}
@Embeddable
public class NotAutoInstantiated {
private String field2;
}
I don't think the JPA spec clearly describes what should happen when an @Embedded object's properties are all null, but at least some implementations treat an object with null properties as a null object, which is what you're seeing.
This seems like a reasonable implementation. Certainly it's been useful in my code (using Hibernate) where if I set an @Embedded object to null I want it to remain null when I load a persisted version.
In your example, the AutoInstantiated class can never be considered null, since the primitive property theKey can never be null.