Field loaded from many-to-many relation disappears once the new entity object leaves the transaction

I have the current many-to-many-relation between employees and their roles (keys and indexes are handled externally by the migration tool):

object RoleTable: UUIDTable("role") {
  val role = text("role_name")
}

class RoleEntity(id: EntityID<UUID>) : UUIDEntity(id)  {
  var role by RoleTable.role

  companion object : UUIDEntityClass<RoleEntity>(RoleTable)
}

object EmployeeTable : UUIDTable("employee") {
  val name = text("name")
}

class EmployeeEntity(id: EntityID<UUID>) : UUIDEntity(id) {
  var name by EmployeeTable.name
  var roles by RoleEntity via EmployeeRoleTable

  companion object : UUIDEntityClass<EmployeeEntity>(EmployeeTable)
}

object EmployeeRoleTable: Table("employeeRole") {
  val employeeId = reference("employee_id", EmployeeTable) //part of primary key
  val roleId = reference("role_id", RoleTable) //part of primary key
}

When I create a new employee, I want to also save their roles and return the stored employeeEntity object, including the roles.

  private fun newEmployeeEntity(
    name: String,
    roles: List<String>
  ): EmployeeEntity {

    transaction {

    val roleEntities = roles.map { 
      RoleEntity.new(UUID.randomUUID()) { this.role = role } 
    }

    val createdEmployee = EmployeeEntity.new(UUID.randomUUID()) {
      name = name
      roles = SizedCollection(roleEntities)
    }
    
    return createdEmployee
  }
}

If I check the value of createdEmployee.roles within the transaction, it contains an object of type LazySizedCollection. If I hit it with .toList or load(EmployeeEntity::roles), it resolves to a list of roleEntites as expected. But as soon as I leave the transaction, the value of roles in the returned entity becomes null.

How do I keep the list of roleEntities when I leave the transaction?

[Tapac]

https://github.com/JetBrains/Exposed/issues/281#issuecomment-925968534

[Tapac]

@SabrinaKall , I wasn’t able to reproduce it in test. Please check that commit