no annotations within aspects ?!

[BADJAN]

Hi,

I'm trying to realise a logging of the current user action.
For that I defined an anspect that logs each method called in a certain package.
The methods can be annotated with @UserTrace to add more information to the current action.
Everything works well except that I just can't get the annotation information from the method. Within the Aspectmethod no annotation is present.
Simple reflections tests without using aspects proofed, that there are annotations and that its working.
So the question is - why are no annotations present within an aspect?

My Web-Application uses: Spring 2.5.6 and Spring WebFlow 2.0.8

Aspect WorkTrace

@Aspect
public class WorkTrace {
		
	@Around("execution(* de.xxx.web.backingbeans.*.*(..))")
	public Object logCurrentWork(ProceedingJoinPoint proceedingJoinPoint) throws Throwable{
		
		final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(proceedingJoinPoint.getTarget().getClass());
		Signature sig = proceedingJoinPoint.getSignature();
				
		String infoStep = "";
		String infoDesc = "";
		
		if(sig instanceof MethodSignature){
			MethodSignature mSig = (MethodSignature)sig;
			Method method = mSig.getMethod();	
/* following doesnt work - says there is no annotation */		
			if(method.isAnnotationPresent(UserTrace.class)){
				UserTrace ut = method.getAnnotation(UserTrace.class);
				infoStep = ut.stepName();
				infoDesc = ut.stepDescription();
			}
		}
	    final String methodName = sig.getName();

		log.info("WORKTRACE:: "+methodName+" STEP: "+infoStep+" INFO: "+infoDesc);
	    
		Object returnValue = proceedingJoinPoint.proceed();
		return returnValue;
		
	}	
}

Annotation UserTrace

@Target(value=ElementType.METHOD)
@Retention(value=RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface UserTrace {

	public String stepName();
	public String stepDescription();
	
}

matching codepart

@Secured(value={"ROLE_ADMIN"})
	@UserTrace(stepName="Speicher oder Updaten eines Hauptbereichs",stepDescription="n.a.")
	public void saveOrUpdateBackEndArea(SoBackEndArea bea){
/* ...do some things ... */
}

works without aspect

Method mme = me.getMethod("saveOrUpdateBackEndArea", SoBackEndArea.class);
                               if(mme.isAnnotationPresent(UserTrace.class)){
					UserTrace rA = mme.getAnnotation(UserTrace.class);
					logger.info("--> "+rA.stepName());
				}
			Annotation[] allAnnotations = mme.getAnnotations();
			for (int i = 0; i < allAnnotations.length; i++) {
				Annotation a = allAnnotations[i];
				Class aClass = a.annotationType();
				logger.info("x -Annotation: "+a.getClass().getName()+" -> "+aClass.getName());								
			}

Has anyone an idea why it's not possible to access annotations within the aspectcode ?!?

Greetz - Jan

[bdangubic]

read about annotation inheritance

[Marten Deinum]

You are also having an @Secured, which probably means you are proxying a proxy class and the proxy doesn't have the annotations. Spring uses a proxy based aop approach which in general can be enough but when using multiple proxy mechanism/proxy generators together it might become troublesome.

[BADJAN]

thanks both of you!

I read about annotation inheritance and in fact that spring uses proxies and therefore might extend the annotation, I tried to get it working with @Inherited
...unfortunately this didn't change anything

I also removed the @Secured annotation to be sure its has nothing in common with that one, but again no change in behaviour ...still no annotations found.

So if spring proxies are the cause of this problem it could be useful to switch to aspectJ Loadtimewaeving instead of using proxy based spring aop.
...unfortunately I didn't had luck in configuration change, so it didn't work for now ...but I will try again tomorrow.

however, do you think there is a solution allowing to stay with proxy based spring aop?