Can javax.persistence.Query.getResultList() return null?

Question

And if so, under what circumstances?

Javadoc and JPA spec says nothing.

Answer 1

If you take a close look at the org.hibernate.loader.Loader (4.1) you will see that the list is always initialized inside the processResultSet() method (doc, source).

protected List processResultSet(...) throws SQLException {
   final List results = new ArrayList();

   handleEmptyCollections( queryParameters.getCollectionKeys(), rs, session );
   ...
   return results;

}

So I don't think it will return null now.