Constructing a List inside @Entity

Question

Dear folks,
I have an entity bean:
@Entity
public class EmployeeGroup {
    @ManyToMany
    private List<Employee> employees;
}when the entity is not yet managed, the employees list is null.
To get around this, I've put the following into the getter:
public List<Employee> getEmployees() {
    if (employees == null) {
        employees = new ArrayList<Employee>();
    return employees;
}I was wondering if that is proper way to do that. Any comments appreciated.
Regards

Answer 1

Yes, I had recently determined that the cause was the selectionChange firing on the outer list.
To answer your question, there really isn't a good reason I can't.  When I started learning the Spark architecture, I challenged myself to forego the halo components altogether, and have been building with that in mind.
Its really funny, I was looking at that post on your blog yesterday, and I downloaded the source, and couldn't understand how the thing was built.
So, it looks like I need to do 1 of 2 things.
1. Figure out a way to change the hit area for the List component, or otherwise swallow the selectedIndexChange on the parent List.
or
2. Re-build using the mx:Tree or figure out how yours works.