Is it good practice to initialize fields inside a JPA entity getter?
In POJO Java beans such code can be beneficial, especially with collections:

<!-- language: lang-java -->

    class POJO {
        private Collection<X> col;
        
        public Collection<X> getCol() {
            if (col == null)
               col = new SomeCollection<X>();

            return col;
        }
    }

It makes possible for the code using `POJO` to call `pojo.getCol().isEmpty()` without an additional null check, thus making the code clearer.

Suppose the `POJO` class is a JPA entity, is it still safe to do that? By initializing the collection from null to an empty one the persistent data won't be changed, but still, we are modifying the object and thus the persistence provider may run some side effects upon flushing the persistence context. What do we risk? Portability maybe?
Is it good practice to initialize fields inside a JPA entity getter?
===

In POJO Java beans such code can be beneficial, especially with collections:

<!-- language: lang-java -->

    class POJO {
        private Collection<X> col;
        
        public Collection<X> getCol() {
            if (col == null)
               col = new SomeCollection<X>();

            return col;
        }
    }

It makes possible for the code using `POJO` to call `pojo.getCol().isEmpty()` without an additional null check, thus making the code clearer.

Suppose the `POJO` class is a JPA entity, is it still safe to do that? By initializing the collection from null to an empty one the persistent data won't be changed, but still, we are modifying the object and thus the persistence provider may run some side effects upon flushing the persistence context. What do we risk? Portability maybe?