akka.pattern.AskTimeoutException is thrown while persisting an event

I just started with Lagom & Akka. I am following the design decribed in Domain Modelling with Akka Persistence Typed

I am trying to create a brand new instance of an entity (EntityState). But the event is not getting persisted, and I am getting the following error:

00:54:27.862 [error] com.example.impl.entity.EntityClass [persistencePhase=running-cmd, akkaAddress=akka://XXX@127.0.0.1:60685, akkaSource=akka://XXX/system/sharding/StateClass/186/ID1, sourceActorSystem=XXX, persistenceId=StateClass|ID1] - Supervisor StopSupervisor saw failure: null
java.lang.NullPointerException: null
    at akka.persistence.typed.javadsl.EventSourcedBehavior.$anonfun$apply$4(EventSourcedBehavior.scala:195)
    at akka.persistence.typed.internal.Running$RunningState.applyEvent(Running.scala:78)
    at akka.persistence.typed.internal.Running$HandlingCommands.applyEffects(Running.scala:153)
    at akka.persistence.typed.internal.Running$HandlingCommands.onCommand(Running.scala:123)
    at akka.persistence.typed.internal.Running$HandlingCommands.onMessage(Running.scala:105)
    at akka.persistence.typed.internal.Running$HandlingCommands.onMessage(Running.scala:100)
    at akka.actor.typed.scaladsl.AbstractBehavior.receive(AbstractBehavior.scala:83)

I have a Create command, which invokes onCreate(), and eventually attempts to persist an EntityCreated event.

Service Impl method

@Override
public ServiceCall<CreateMessage, StateView> createState(){
    return message ->
            entityRef(message.getName())
                    .<EntityClass.Accepted>ask(replyTo -> new EntityClass.Create(message, replyTo), askTimeout)
                    .thenApply(accepted -> toStateView(accepted.getSummary()));
}

Command handler:

private ReplyEffect<Event, StateClass> onCreate(StateClass state, Create cmd) {
    return Effect()
            .persist(new EntityCreated(cmd.getDetails().getName(), Instant.now()))
            .thenReply(cmd.replyTo, e -> new Accepted(EntityClass.toSummary(e)));
}

I am able to confirm the following:

exception is thrown during persist()
the event is not present in Cassandra

Your help is appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Solution

It seems that the real cause for the exception was because I should have added logic for handling the event as follows: in helloEvents(), I needed to add logic similar to the following:

if (eventAndOffset.first() instanceof HelloEvent.GreetingMessageChanged) {
    HelloEvent.GreetingMessageChanged messageChanged = (HelloEvent.GreetingMessageChanged) eventAndOffset.first();
    eventToPublish = new GreetingMessageChanged(messageChanged.getName(), messageChanged.getMessage());
}

In Addition, in the aggregate's eventHandler(), I needed to add logic similar to the following:

builder.forAnyState()
    .onEvent(GreetingMessageChanged.class, (state, evt) ->
        // We simply update the current state to use the greeting message from
        // the event.
        state.withMessage(evt.message)
);