Question

I have some methods advised by two aspects, one is using the spring AOP support and the other is a BeanPostProcessor (MethodValidationPostProcessor specifically) which advises all method with @Validation annotation. With my unit tests I am trying to force throwing an error by breaking the method contract, but sometimes the validation is in place (the advise imposed by the above mentioned post processor) and sometimes does not work. Does anybody have experienced something similar.

Here is a small snippet of what I am trying to do:

Aspect code:

@Aspect
@Component
public final class LoggingAspect {
    @Before(value = "execution(public * * (..)) && @annotation(loggable)",
    argNames = "joinPoint, loggable")
    public void before(JoinPoint joinPoint, Loggable loggable) {
         //logging here... 
    }
}

Annotation (Loggable Code)

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
public @interface Loggable {...}

Interface being annotated with @Validated annotation (Here’s a link with related info).

@Validated
public interface Dao<T, K> {
    T findById(@NotNull K id);
    T persist(@NotNull T object);
}

A base class implementing this interface:
public abstract class BaseDao implements DAO {
@Loggable
public T persist(T object){…}
}

And a subclass with a particular behavior:
public final class UserDao extends BaseDao {
@Loggable
public T findById(User object){…}
}

And the spring context at last something like this

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy/>
<context:annotation-config/>
<context:component-scan base-package="com.my.package"/>
<bean id="validator"
  class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean"/>
<bean class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.MethodValidationPostProcessor"/>

I am testing by calling both methods with null as the argument, but in some occasions I received an IllegalArgumentException: attempt to create saveOrUpdate event with null entity instead of the MethodConstraintViolationException supposedly raised by the
instead MethodValidationInterceptor which advises/intercepts all public method for @Validated annotated interfaces.

EDIT: I am using spring 3.1, Hibernate Validator 4.2 (as required by spring) and aspectj 1.7.

EDIT 2: I did some more digging around the test code, and I found out there is something strange related to the MethodValidationPostProcessor or the MethodValidationInterceptor. I disabled the aop-autoproxy and remove the LoggerAspect during testing, and still there is some problem that in some occasion the Validation resulted in what I expected and in some other situations where even though it is supposed to fails the MethodValidationInterceptor or the MethodValidator fails to catch the errors in the calls.

Answer 1

Digging around I found out the problem was related to where I put the annotations. Sorry for the inconvenience.