Any ideas why I would be experiencing flakiness with #getReference? Under some circumstances I can get an NPE when calling the methods of the object returned by #getReference. For example, I can run a unit test over and over and sometimes I will get an NPE and sometimes not.

If I use #find or #merge instead everything seems to be fine. Here's an example:



Sometimes when I call #getId on the entity to operate on I will get an NPE. If I change #getReference to #find or #merge it always works. Note that this is not deterministic, the failure only happens sometimes on the same exact code paths. Any pointers on what I should start looking into to resolve this?

TIA!

As first thing you could report the stacktraces of your NPE's and tell which version of hibernate you are using.
Otherwise it is difficult to help you.