If I have a Customer object which has an Address object how can I ensure that the address is never null even though its fields in the database may be null.

e.g.



No suppose that for a particular customer street and town have not been set. Hibernate then does not create an Address object and sets the customer's address to null. What i want though is for this customer to have an empty address object.

does this make sense?

You should do this logic in the setter and/or getter methods. Thats what they are there for, right?

If you mapp this as a one-to-one, and give Adress a propper ID, it should work ... You cannot use component mappings here, IMHO

When I add a check in the setter i.e



hibernate issues a new update to the customer at the end of the transaction. I would like to avoid this.



Doesn't that mean that i will have to create a mapping file for Address? Since I will have many classes like Adress i'd rather not create separate mappings for them all.