Spring Dependency Injecting an annotated Aspect

aopaspectjdependency-injectionload-time-weavingspring

Using Spring I've had some issues with doing a dependency injection on an annotated Aspect class. CacheService is injected upon the Spring context's startup, but when the weaving takes place, it says that the cacheService is null. So I am forced to relook up the spring context manually and get the bean from there.
Is there another way of going about it?

Here is an example of my Aspect:

import org.apache.log4j.Logger;
import org.aspectj.lang.ProceedingJoinPoint;
import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Around;
import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect;
import com.mzgubin.application.cache.CacheService;

@Aspect
public class CachingAdvice {

  private static Logger log = Logger.getLogger(CachingAdvice.class);

  private CacheService cacheService;

  @Around("execution(public *com.mzgubin.application.callMethod(..)) &&"
            + "args(params)")
    public Object addCachingToCreateXMLFromSite(ProceedingJoinPoint pjp, InterestingParams params) throws Throwable {
    log.debug("Weaving a method call to see if we should return something from the cache or create it from scratch by letting control flow move on");

    Object result = null;
    if (getCacheService().objectExists(params))}{
      result = getCacheService().getObject(params);
    } else {
      result = pjp.proceed(pjp.getArgs());
      getCacheService().storeObject(params, result);
    }
    return result;
  }

  public CacheService getCacheService(){
    return cacheService;
  }

  public void setCacheService(CacheService cacheService){
    this.cacheService = cacheService;
  }
}

Best Answer

Since the aspect is created before the Spring container, you have to retrieve the aspect from the Aspect's factory method aspectOf(ExampleClass.class).

From the Spring XML configuration, you can retrieve the aspect (object) like this:

<bean id="traceAspect" class="aspects.trace.TraceAspect"
    factory-method="aspectOf" />

Factory methods are the normal way to retrieve objects created outside the Spring container like an Enum.