How to autowire fields into an aspectj aspect in Springboot?

Question

I have a Springboot service. I am using Aspectj AOP for access control. I have an aspect class AuthorizationAspect with an autowired field with some access control methods. The autowired field is always null.

Aspect class:

@Aspect
public class AuthorizationAspect {

    @Autowired
    private UserService userService;

    @Around(
        "execution(* some.controller.Method(..))"
    )
    public ResponseEntity<?> checkIfAdmin(ProceedingJoinPoint joinPoint) throws Throwable {
        // do something with userService
    }
...
}

The field userService is always null.

I've tried adding @Configurable(autowire = Autowire.BY_TYPE) to the Aspect class and adding <bean id="authorizationAspect" class="com.example.accesscontrol.AuthorizationAspect" factory-method="aspectOf"></bean> to beans.xml, but nothing seems to work.

How can I resolve this issue?

MCVE: https://github.com/ajones239/SO-MCVE-76996582

Answer 1

Thanks for the MCVE. It was key to understanding your situation. I sent you a pull request fixing the problem.

Basically, you need to follow the Spring manual chapter Using AspectJ to Dependency Inject Domain Objects with Spring and use @Configurable on your native aspect and @EnableSpringConfigured on your Spring application. Last but not least, you need a factory method for the native aspect to make it known to Spring:

@Bean
public AuthorizationAspect authorizationAspect() {
  return Aspects.aspectOf(AuthorizationAspect.class);
}

The important commit from my PR is acb5da67.