Intercept nested methods using native AspectJ in Spring Boot

Question

I am trying to intercept any method in my application which is annotated with my custom developed annotation.

Initially I used the Spring AOP which works fine. But, it is not intercepting if the method call is in the same target class. Going through the official docs, I got to know that the Spring AOP uses proxy beans for the same.

One workaround I found was to self inject the target class. But, this seems like too much fuss. Like every time I am adding my custom annotation to a method, I need to make sure that I add the @Scope annotation, set the proxyMode & self inject target class as shown here

Later I moved on to configuring and using native AspectJ.

This is my Custom annotation:

@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface TrackTime {
    String description() default "";
}

Here is the Aspect for TrackTime annotation:

@Configuration
@Slf4j
@Aspect
public class TrackTimeServiceImpl {

    @Pointcut("execution(public * *(..))")
    public void methodsToBeProfiled(){

    }

    @Around("methodsToBeProfiled() && @annotation(x.y.z.TrackTime)")
    public Object audit(ProceedingJoinPoint joinPoint) throws Exception {
        //Business logic
    }
}

I would like to mention here that my application is running on Jetty server.

The configuration file:

@Configuration
@EnableLoadTimeWeaving(aspectjWeaving = EnableLoadTimeWeaving.AspectJWeaving.ENABLED)
@EnableSpringConfigured
@EnableAspectJAutoProxy(proxyTargetClass = true)
public class TrackTimeConfig implements LoadTimeWeavingConfigurer {

    @Override
    public LoadTimeWeaver getLoadTimeWeaver() {
        return new InstrumentationLoadTimeWeaver();
    }

}

The aop.xml file: Path to file: /resources/META-INF/aop.xml

<!DOCTYPE aspectj PUBLIC "-//AspectJ//DTD//EN" "https://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/dtd/aspectj.dtd">
<aspectj>

    <weaver>
        <!-- only weave classes in our application-specific packages -->
        <include within="in.xxx.*"/>
    </weaver>

    <aspects>
        <!-- weave in just this aspect -->
        <aspect name="in.xxx.yyy.zzz.TrackTimeServiceImpl"/>
    </aspects>

</aspectj>

Relative dependencies added in parent pom.xml have been mentioned here:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.aspectj</groupId>
            <artifactId>aspectjweaver</artifactId>
            <version>1.8.13</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-aop</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-aspects</artifactId>
            <version>5.3.21</version>
        </dependency>

My service class:

@Component
public class SomeService {

    public void a(){
        b();
    }

    @TrackTime
    public void b(){
        //business logic
    }
}

Now when the method a() is called from the controller, even though the b() has the @TrackTime annotation, it is not intercepted.

Also, I would like to mention that I have set the following program arguments while running the application

-javaagent:/Users/xxx/.m2/repository/org/springframework/spring-instrument/5.3.6/spring-instrument-5.3.6.jar
-javaagent:/Users/xxx/.m2/repository/org/aspectj/aspectjweaver/1.9.6/aspectjweaver-1.9.6.jar

I have gone through docs, articles, followed solutions on stackoverflow. But, for the above mentioned configuration/code, it is not working as I want.

Requesting help from the community.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I did not try to run your example locally yet, but noticed two details at first glance in your code:

1. You are configuring both @EnableLoadTimeWeaving (for native AspectJ) and @EnableAspectJAutoProxy (for Spring AOP), which might be conflicting with each other. Try to remove the latter and see if it fixes the problem.

2. In aop.xml, you are using <include within="in.xxx.*"/>. Please note that this will only include classes directly in the in.xxx package, but not classes in sub-packages. In order to include them as well, please use the double-dot notation in.xxx..*.

Feel free to report back if it is still not working with the suggested changes. I can take a closer look then.

Answer 2

First of all, I would like to thank @hfontanez, @void void & @kriegaex for responding and helping me out in moving forward in solving the problem statement.

So if anyone is looking out on how to intercept nested & private methods, let's have this as a one stop in configuring native AspectJ.

Please check my POC here on github for a working example.

In my case, I added the aspectjweaver JAR in my project structure and passed the arguments through VM Options in IDE.

That all !! Nested/Private methods will now be intercepted.

Thank you, Karthik