I'm looking for some confirmation on the following behavior using Hibernate 3.6.5

I have this in an @Entity


When I store a list of [null, "", null, "", null] what I get back when I go to retrieve the data is [null, "", null, ""]. Similarly if I just try to store [null] I get back an empty on retrieval. I understand that the values variable itself will never be null since an empty set and null are essentially the same thing but it seems strange that null entries at the end of my list are dropped.

After doing a little more digging it appears that hibernate is not persisting collection rows that have null values. For example here is what gets stored in the UP_PORTLET_PREF_VALUES table for a list of [null, "", null, "", null].




It appears that by-design hibernate is not persisting a row for each null value in the List. This works if the last value is not null because the IndexColumn allows for reconstruction of the List with null entries and the List is the correct length. In the case of the last entry being null though only entries up to the last non-null entry are reconstructed due to the lack of List length data in the DB.

Is this the intended behavior?