Spring AOP Pointcut does not trigger

Question

I am new to Spring and AOP. I am trying this simple thing where I have created a custom annotation which when placed before any method should execute some code. This is the annotation I created

    // Declares a custom annotation that validates json
    @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
    @Target(ElementType.METHOD)
    public @interface JsonSchemaAnnotation {
    }

Next I created the Spring Aspect class which holds the logic

@Aspect
public class UpdateUIMetadataInterceptor {

@Pointcut("execution(public * com.fico.cardinal.cm.*.*(..))")
public void anyPublicMethod() {
    System.out.println("Running");
}

@Before("anyPublicMethod() && @annotation(jsonSchemaAnnotation)")
public void validateJson(ProceedingJoinPoint pjp) throws Throwable {
    System.out.println("Running");  
}

}

And this is my simple test class

public class ValidationTest {

public static void main(String[] args) {
    ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("spring/configuration.xml");
    String jsondata = "{\"id\": \"EXPENSE_REPORT\",\"properties\": {\"transactionType\": \"EXPENSE_REPORT\"},\"sections\": []} ]}";
    ValidationTest test = new ValidationTest();
    test.jsonValidationTest("dummy", jsondata);
    ((AbstractApplicationContext) context).close();


}

@JsonSchemaAnnotation
public void jsonValidationTest(String dummy, String jsondata) {
    System.out.println("Success");

}

The problem is my spring aop never gets triggered. I have included a bean in my configuration.xml

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy>
    <aop:include name="UpdateUIMetadataInterceptor" />
</aop:aspectj-autoproxy>
<bean id="updateUI"      class="com.fico.cardinal.cm.interceptor.UpdateUIMetadataInterceptor" />

Can anyone point out what I am missing?

Answer 1

You have several problems with your code:

1. You should create your ValidationTest object as a bean managed by Spring and not using new
2. <aop:include name="UpdateUIMetadataInterceptor" /> should be <aop:include name="updateUI"/>; you can actually just stick with <aop:aspectj-autoproxy/> for simplicity here
3. ProceedingJoinPoint is not supported for before aspects, so remove it; you can use JoinPoint instead if you need access to arguments
4. JsonSchemaAnnotation jsonSchemaAnnotation parameter should be present for validateJson method of your aspect, as pointed out by frant.hartm