Aspect around advice not triggering on controller

Question

I have an aspect advice that tracks the execution of classes annotated with @Service. The code is currently working but I would like to change it to track REST endpoints on controllers instead of autowired services. Here is the code:

@Aspect
public class AuditingAspect
{
    @Pointcut(
            //TODO Change pointcut from public methods in Services to REST endpoints in Controllers
            "execution(public * my.base.package..*.*(..))" //Must be in package
                    //+ " && @within(org.springframework.stereotype.Service)" //Has to be a service
                    + " && @within(org.springframework.stereotype.Controller)" //Has to be a controller
    )
    public void auditLoggingPointCut() {
        //no op
    }

    @Around(value ="auditLoggingPointCut()")
    public Object logAround(final ProceedingJoinPoint joinPoint) throws Throwable
    {
        System.out.println("Exection");

        returnVal = joinPoint.proceed();

        // Now Do The After Logging Part
        afterReturningLog(joinPoint, returnVal) ;

        return returnVal;
    }

    private void afterReturningLog(final JoinPoint joinPoint, final Object returnValue)
    {
        System.out.println("Exiting");
    }
}

When I change the "within" from @Service to @Controller, I don't see any output from the advice but the method executes when accessed from the URL. What is different about a Controller that would ignore execution?

The Controller class looks like this:

@Controller
public class CaseReferralEndpoints {

    @Autowired
    CaseReferralFacade caseReferralFacade;

    @RequestMapping(value="/backgroundcheck/getcasereferrals", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @ResponseBody
    public List<CaseReferralSection> getCaseReferrals(@RequestParam("caseID") Long caseID) {
        return caseReferralFacade.getCaseReferrals(caseID); 
    }
}

Here is my applicationContext-aop.xml The full config is much larger but I believe this is the most relevant.

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



    <bean class="gov.dhs.uscis.elis2.backend.services.logging.AuditingAspect"/>

    <aop:aspectj-autoproxy proxy-target-class="false" />


</beans>

Answer 1

Supposing that your @within configuration is correct, a potential remedy to your troubles would be the following:

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy proxy-target-class="true" />

Also you will have to add CGLIB to your classpath

The above steps are needed since your controller does not implement an interface

Finally if you have a root context and a web context, the aop related stuff needs to be applied to the web context (having it in the root context will not work for the controllers that are configured in the web context)

UPDATE

In Gradle to add CGLIB to the classpath add:

'cglib:cglib:2.2.2'

In Maven it would be:

<dependency>
    <groupId>cglib</groupId>
    <artifactId>cglib</artifactId>
    <version>2.2.2</version>
</dependency>

Answer 2

Error was found inside of the applicationContext.xml

My controllers were being filtered out of context scanning! I'm one of many developers on the project so I did not think to look here initially.

<context:component-scan>
    <!-- a bunch of packages -->

    <context:exclude-filter expression="org.springframework.stereotype.Controller" type="annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>

However, I ended up adding an Interceptor which has proven to be closer to what I wanted. Because all of our user actions are REST driven it was easier and cleaner to audit the invocation of REST calls than try and track autowired service methods.

Answer 3

As your pointcut expression is having

 @within(org.springframework.stereotype.Service)

with && symbol , advice is going to apply only within your package upto service.

and i hope your controller class is not inside ..Service package, it might be inside .*.*Controller package so its not executing for controller

solution Remove within inside point cut expression

or add controller also inside point cut expression

Answer 4

Assuming your pointcut is correct, and you are using two spring contexts, one for the services/daos (appcontext) and one for the controllers (servletcontext), my tip goes in the direction of misconfiguration.

AOP configuration is one of the spring beans which are applied ONLY inside the context it is declared/scanned.

So assuming you have a servletcontext.xml for your controllers your pointcuts wont be applied unless you declare the aop context configuration within this context.

(The application context declaration will be needed if you want to apply the pointcuts to your services.)