NullAway 0.13.6 no longer flags uninitialized JPA property missing @Nullable

[jeffrey-easyesi]

import jakarta.persistence.*;
@Entity
@org.jspecify.annotations.NullMarked
public class TestEntity {
    private String name;
    private String extraInfo;

    public TestEntity() {} // for JPA
    public TestEntity(String name) { this.name = name; }

    @Id
    public String getName() { return name; }
    public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; }

    public String getExtraInfo() { return extraInfo; }
    public void setExtraInfo(String s) { this.extraInfo = s; }
}

NullAway 0.13.4 correctly warns on the uninitialized non-null field extraInfo, which ought to be @Nullable.
(It also complains about the no-arg constructor, but that's easily fixed with NullAway:ExternalInitAnnotations=jakarta.persistence.Entity.)

NullAway 0.13.6 allows extraInfo to be unannotated, even though it probably isn't set for all objects.

[msridhar]

Hi @jeffrey-easyesi this change was deliberate. I assumed the @Entity annotation would mean that the field would get initialized by JPA. Is your concern here that there is no warning for the other constructor that takes an argument?

[jeffrey-easyesi]

Yes - a typical entity class for us has both

• no-arg constructor for the JPA framework to call when deserializing existing entities from the database
• other constructor(s) called from application code to create a new entity, i.e. entityManager.persist(new TestEntity(name));

[msridhar]

Thanks, @jeffrey-easyesi, let me think about how we can still report warnings for constructors with arguments in these cases.