In which order are annotations processed by Spring AOP?

Question

I have a method that has two annotations:

@Transactional
@SchedulerLock
public void test() {
    // do something
}

I'm wondering what happens first. Will first be a transaction created and then the locking will happen, or the other way round? Or isn't this even determined?

I tried to figure this out by reading the documentation, but I'm unsure where to even start. The only thing I could find was a random comment without source that said that the order is random.

Which problem are you trying to solve? Why would it even be relevant or helpful to know what comes first? Does it really make sense to focus on a technical detail like that and develop code relying on sacred knowledge and a certain internal behaviour of the framework you use? — kriegaex, May 31 '23 at 09:35
Does this SO [answer](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8818143/spring-annotation-advice-order) help ? — R.G, Jun 14 '23 at 06:08

Sergey Tsypanov · Answer 1 · 2023-05-30T20:35:11.310

In general the relative order of annotation aspect is not specified be default, moreover it might vary from version to version.

As it is mentioned in the answer to this question you can specify the order:

You need to change relative order of @Transactional and @Cacheable aspects.

The link there points to outdated documentation, so if you really need ordering I'd split this method into two, moving each into separate component and call one from another one (or vice versa), e.g.:

class A {
  private final B b;

  @SchedulerLock
  public void test() {
    b.test();
  }
}

class B {

  @Transactional
  public void test() {
    // do smth
  }
}

In which order are annotations processed by Spring AOP?

1 Answers1