Eclipse: Create getters with java.util.Optional for String members

Question

In eclipse you can easily create getters and setters for your classes' fields.

Before:

package main;

public class TestClass {
    private String someString;
    private boolean someBoolean;
}

After creating the getters (as we don't care for setters in this question):

package main;

public class TestClass {
    private String someString;
    private boolean someBoolean;

    /**
     * @return the someString
     */
    public String getSomeString() {
        return someString;
    }

    /**
     * @return the someBoolean
     */
    public boolean isSomeBoolean() {
        return someBoolean;
    }
}

But if you do not initialize the String value getSomeString() will return null, meaning that if I want to work with the String in the calling object, I have to always check if for null first.

To avoid this I found some solutions:

1. Initialize the Strings immediately at their declaration: private String someString = "";
2. Reflections
3. return someString == null ? someString : "";
4. Using java.util.Optional
5. there are probably many more ways...

While writing this question I figured out that probably for the simple String case the first method should work best: I can easily initialize the Strings to whatever I like and am done.

The reflection approach linked above seemed okay, but a bit messy to handle exceptions where a String should not be initialized with the empty string.

The null check is okay but now with Java 8 the last method, employing java.util.Optional feels like the right way to do that. I would do it like this:

public String getSomeString() {
    return Optional.ofNullable(someString).orElse("");
}

Is it possible to get eclipse's code templates into creating getters like this one for Strings (or all non-primitive types) only?

The standard template used (see Project -> Properties -> Java Code Style -> Code Templates -> Code -> Getter body) is:

return ${field};

I can replace it with

return java.util.Optional.ofNullable(${field}).orElse("");

which helps for Strings - but for all other types it obviously fails. So I tried

${:import(java.util.Optional)}
return Optional.ofNullable(${field}).orElse(new ${return_type}());

which is not allowed, because Variable 'return_type' is not known. and additionally the ${:import(java.util.Optional)} is not solved as the help makes you believe (I assume it is because Code Templates are just a stricter subset of Templates, more or less). The first makes sense - if ${return_type} is a primitive, this is likely to fail.

Is there a way to make it happen that eclipse generates such custom getters for me? This answer allows to create such getter for one field, but that would mean I had to do it for each field individually. Is it possible to also just have it done by Source -> Generate getters/setters (or any other similar method)?

Or do you think it's best to initialize such objects at their declaration anyway?