Spring AOP and AOP Alliance MethodValidators

The Spring framework has in general an excellent documentation. One exception to me is the reference guide's chapter on Spring AOP, which I personally find not as comprehensible as other parts of the documentation.

What I'm missing in particular is a complete example demonstrating how to use Spring AOP together with AOP Alliance MethodInterceptors. Where possible, I prefer to use AOP Alliance compliant interceptors over other Spring AOP advice types, as they foster interoperability with other AOP frameworks compatible with the AOP Alliance API, such as Google Guice.

So without further ado, an example for using AOP Alliance method interceptors with Spring AOP is shown in the following.

First define an interceptor by implementing the interface org.aopalliance.intercept.MethodInterceptor:

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@Component public class InvocationCountInterceptor implements MethodInterceptor { private AtomicLong invocationCount = new AtomicLong(); @Override public Object invoke(MethodInvocation invocation) throws Throwable { invocationCount.incrementAndGet(); return invocation.proceed(); } public AtomicLong getInvocationCount() { return invocationCount; } }

By specifying the @Component stereotype annotation, the interceptor is enabled to be detected automatically by the Spring container using component scanning.

Now the types/methods to which the interceptor shall be applied need to be configured. Using Spring's AOP schema, this is done by defining an advisor which references the interceptor bean and links it with a pointcut expression describing the targeted methods:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop" xsi:schemaLocation=" http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.1.xsd "> ... <aop:config> <aop:advisor advice-ref="invocationCountInterceptor" pointcut="within(de.gmorling.moapa.springaop.service..*)"/> </aop:config> ... </beans>

Here the interceptor is applied to all invocations of methods defined within the de.gmorling.moapa.springaop.service package and its sub-packages. But the pointcut could also be more fine-grained and match only methods on specific types or even single methods.

If several interceptors shall be bound to the same pointcut, the pointcut expression can also be defined separately and referenced from multiple advisors like so:

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... <aop:config> <aop:pointcut id="serviceLayer" expression="within(de.gmorling.moapa.springaop.service..*)"/> <aop:advisor advice-ref="invocationCountInterceptor" pointcut-ref="serviceLayer"/> <aop:advisor advice-ref="anotherInterceptor" pointcut-ref="serviceLayer"/> </aop:config> ...

Note that the AspectJ weaver JAR and – when applying interceptors to classes – CGLIB 2 need to be on the class path. A complete sample Maven project can be found on GitHub.