Spring AOP Advice on Annotated Controllers

Question

I am trying to use AOP to do some processing after an annotated controller. Everything is running with no errors, but the advice is not being executed.

Here is the controller code:

@Controller
public class HomeController {       
    @RequestMapping("/home.fo")
    public String home(ModelMap model) {
        model = new ModelMap();
        return "home";
    }   
}

and the setup in application-config

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy/>

<bean id="testAdvice" class="com.test.TestAdvice">
</bean>

<bean id="testAdvisor"
    class="org.springframework.aop.aspectj.AspectJExpressionPointcutAdvisor">
    <property name="advice" ref="testAdvice" />
    <property name="expression" value="execution(* *.home(..))" />
</bean>

and the actual advice

public class TestAdvice implements AfterReturningAdvice {

    protected final Log logger = LogFactory.getLog(getClass());

    public void afterReturning(Object returnValue, Method method, Object[] args,
            Object target) throws Throwable {
        logger.info("Called after returning advice!");
    }
}

Is it even possible to have advice on annotated controllers? I am using Spring 2.5.

Answer 1

It's possible to have advice on annotated controllers.

I assume you want to advice after execution of all methods in classes annotated with @Controller.

Here's an example:

import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.AfterReturning;
import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect;
import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Pointcut;

@Aspect
public class ControllerAspect {

    @Pointcut("within(@org.springframework.stereotype.Controller *)")
    public void controllerBean() {}

    @Pointcut("execution(* *(..))")
    public void methodPointcut() {}

    @AfterReturning("controllerBean() && methodPointcut() ")
    public void afterMethodInControllerClass() {
        System.out.println("after advice..");
    }
}

If you want to use Spring AOP with AspectJ syntax, you also need a configuration file like this:

<?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/aop 
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-2.5.xsd
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

    <bean id="controllerAspect" class="controller.ControllerAspect" />

    <aop:aspectj-autoproxy>
        <aop:include name="controllerAspect" />
    </aop:aspectj-autoproxy>
</beans>

Note: With Spring AOP, the Spring container will only weave Spring beans. If the @Controller object isn't a Spring bean, you must use AspectJ weaving.

Answer 2

I had the same problem where advice for Repository was working, but advice for Controller was not. Finally I found a solution. In short, you need to make sure your AOP definition is loaded in Servlet context, not a different context.

In my case, my Spring AOP definition is defined in tools-config.xml. After moving it from here

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>classpath:spring/tools-config.xml</param-value>
</context-param>

<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

to here,

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>petclinic</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>classpath:spring/mvc-core-config.xml, classpath:spring/tools-config.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

the advice for Controller is working.

Answer 3

For MVC controllers the preferred method of accomplishing what you are trying to do is to use interceptors. See http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-handlermapping-interceptor