Question

Fundamental question: Why aren’t @Embedded objects always instantiated?

The interesting observation is that Ebean does not instantiate @Embedded objects if those do not contain basic datatypes (int, boolean…) or weren’t touched before. Example:

@Entity
public class Embedder {
    // getNotAutoInstantiated() will return null if this field was not touched before
    @Embedded
    private NotAutoInstantiated notAutoInstantiated = new NotAutoInstantiated();
    // getAutoInstantiated() will always return an instance!
    @Embedded
    private AutoInstantiated autoInstantiated = new AutoInstantiated();
}

@Embeddable
public class AutoInstantiated {
    // theKey is why this embedded object is always instantiated
    private int theKey; 
    private String field1;      
}

@Embeddable
public class NotAutoInstantiated {
    private String field2;      
}

Answer 1

I don’t think the JPA spec clearly describes what should happen when an @Embedded object’s properties are all null, but at least some implementations treat an object with null properties as a null object, which is what you’re seeing.

This seems like a reasonable implementation. Certainly it’s been useful in my code (using Hibernate) where if I set an @Embedded object to null I want it to remain null when I load a persisted version.

In your example, the AutoInstantiated class can never be considered null, since the primitive property theKey can never be null.