Ok, but it's still not clear how calling the getter after the setter will help since the setter in the handler will set an empty collection.
And the getter, btw, is called for each item.
The feature Jaikiran mentioned won't work with unordered sequences (it would work fine if the collection items in the XML appeared in a proper sequence but if they are mixed with other elements the final collection value will only complete the last proper sequence of items, which makes sense if you think about it). So, when unordered sequences are enabled (which is currently the default in the AS https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBAS-6744) this feature is turned off.