I've been using Hibernate 3.0.5 for a few weeks now with the help of the HiA book. Some issues I've discovered don't seem to be answered in the book however.

If a category has no items and you call category.getItems(), does Hibernate return null or an empty set/list?

It seems that using an HQL query followed by .list() will always return an empty list but requesting the list of associated objects from a persisted object (as above) will sometimes returns null.

Is this the designed behaviour? Wouldn't it be nicer to always return an empty collection? Is there a flag somewhere to enable this behaviour?

Thanks for your help

Initialize the collection in the declaration: private Set categories = new HashSet();

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