Question

In spring aop you can create advices that will effect all instance of a certain type but what I want is to advise a bean declaration not all beans of that type.

<bean id="bean1" class="type1"/>
<bean id="bean2" class="type1"/>

I want to advise bean1 not all beans of type1. What is the best approach?

Answer 1

From Spring Documentation regarding AOP:

Spring AOP also supports an additional PCD (PointCut Designator) named
‘bean’. This PCD allows you to limit the matching of join points to a
particular named Spring bean, or to a set of named Spring beans (when
using wildcards). The ‘bean’ PCD has the following form:

bean(idOrNameOfBean)

The ‘idOrNameOfBean’ token can be the name of any Spring bean: limited
wildcard support using the ‘*’ character is provided, so if you
establish some naming conventions for your Spring beans you can quite
easily write a ‘bean’ PCD expression to pick them out. As is the case
with other pointcut designators, the ‘bean’ PCD can be &&’ed, ||’ed,
and ! (negated) too.