http://nhjira.koah.net/browse/NH-1211

it keeps getting pushed forward (Fix-version keeps getting bumped up)
but nobody is doing anything about. We dove into the code but we're
unable to find a way of fixing it. NHibernate is much more complicated
on the inside than we thought :-(

Is everybody working around this by manually tickling their collections
just in case they're empty ?

OK, following up for future reference and posteriority :-)

using LEFT JOIN FETCH instead of just JOIN FETCH should make your problem with empty child collections go away.

so instead of doing

FROM Customer c JOIN FETCH c.Orders ord

and suffering exceptions when the customer has no Orders (yet)
you can just do

FROM Customer c LEFT JOIN FETCH c.Orders ord

and get a perfectly initialized empty Orders collection.

Makes sense too but we were under the impression that
JOIN FETCH was just shorthand for LEFT JOIN FETCH.
Turns out not to be true. :-S

Anyway, hope this helps anyone.