Hi! Any interest in us pursuing this? We are obviously committed to update the documentation once we have validated it's the way to go. Thanks for your feedback. On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 3:23 PM, Guillaume Smet <guillaume.smet(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Hi all, > > So, after a long time without any issue (rest assured we were busy > anyway!), we got around a new problem we would like to fix in ORM: > HHH-7610 . > > It's a long standing complaint about the embedded and the fact that > empty components are returned from the ORM. > > We had the "good" idea to fix it by overriding the getter to set the > value to an empty object if null and it's not really a good one: we do > a lot of unnecessary updates due to the fact that our entities are > considered dirty. > > A coworker of mine (Laurent CCed) followed the instructions given by > Steve in HHH-7610 to implement a configuration setting to return an > empty component if all its properties is null: > see https://github.com/openwide-java/hibernate-orm/commit/a219fd38c0a80e6bf0a... > -> we think this one should be ready to commit. It's for 4.3.x. > -> using all the tests with this new setting enabled triggers a few > errors but, after carefully reviewing them, they are all expected due > to the nature of this change. > > We are wondering if we shouldn't also change the isDirty/equals... > stuff to consider 2 components equals if one is null and the other has > all its properties null: it sounds kinda logical to us considering ORM > already automatically transforms one to the other if we save then get > the entity. > > We wrote a few tests to demonstrate the issue and we would like to > know if you would consider this a good idea or not to fix this in both > cases (settings on or off): > https://github.com/openwide-java/hibernate-orm/commit/ee913e79633d3a5ac9c... > > Thanks for your advice. > > -- > Guillaume _______________________________________________ hibernate-dev mailing list hibernate-dev(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev

Hi Steve, On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Steve Ebersole <steve(a)hibernate.org&gt; wrote: > As to your specific question, yes I think what you propose makes sense. > Namely, if this setting is enabled, I think it is reasonable to treat a null > component reference and an empty component reference as equivalent. Thanks for your feedback! Isn't it even more reasonable to treat null and empty as equivalent in the current behavior? Currently, we have: Entity with empty embedded -> save + get -> Entity with null so we are considering that empty embedded and null are the exact same things. If you set again the embedded to an empty one for various reasons, it's going to be considered dirty again which is IMHO wrong. I won't argue a lot about this as we will run all our applications with this setting enabled but I think it will be a performance improvement to fix this in the other case too.

Note that I'm not very familiar with these things so I might have missed an obvious point. We are going to fix the things you commented on Github, work on the documentation and wait for your feedback on this specific point before going further on this particular issue. It would be nice to have it in the next 4.3.x release as we have an application which is particularly affected by this issue. -- Guillaume