Spring AOP - Before Advice | Andrewsy's Space

As we know the Aspect is just the name of the cross-cutting functionality, not the implementation. So what’s the implementation of the cross-cutting functionality? It’s called Advice. An Advice provides the code for implementation of the service. It is like Logging service, Logging is a Aspect and Advice denotes the implementation of Log4j.

There are four types of Adivce:

Before Advice
After Advice
Around Advice
Throws Advice

In this article, we only explain Before Advice. The other advices we will talk about it in later blogs.

The Before Advice is the implementation of the service. It will be applied before the business logic of method is going to execute. So this means this advice will execute before the business logic. we can use it to do something like authentication before the business logic execution.

It will be applied in the runtime of application, not the compilation of the code. And also it will generate a new proxy class which is combined by this advice and business logic class in the runtime automatically.

When we create a Before Advice, we should implement the MethodBeforeAdvice interface, this interface is given by org.springframework.aop.* package. And then we need to override the before method of it.

package spring.test.aop;

import java.lang.reflect.Method;

import org.springframework.aop.MethodBeforeAdvice;

public class MyBeforeAdvice implements MethodBeforeAdvice {

	@Override
	public void before(Method method, Object[] args, Object target)
			throws Throwable {
		// TODO Auto-generated method stub
		
	}

}

There are 3 parameters in the before method.

The first parameter Method method is used to access the method name of the business logic via getName().

The second parameter Object[] args is Object array, it is used to access the arguments of the logic method.

The last parameter Object target is an object to whom this service will be going to apply, usually this will taken care by container, actually we no need to care it.

Okay, let’s see a full example.

<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
			<version>4.1.6.RELEASE</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
			<version>4.1.6.RELEASE</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-beans</artifactId>
			<version>4.1.6.RELEASE</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-aop</artifactId>
			<version>4.1.6.RELEASE</version>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>

In the pom.xml file, we add above dependencies to our project. (this project use maven to manage)

Okay, let us create our logic class, firstly we need to create interface for it.

package spring.test.aop;

public interface MyLogicInterface {
	void add(int a, int b);
	
	void subtract(int a, int b);
}

We created two method in this interface, this interface is very important for our AOP project.

package spring.test.aop;

public class MyLogicClass implements MyLogicInterface {

	@Override
	public void add(int a, int b) {
		String result = String.format("%s + %s = %s", a, b, a + b);
		System.out.println(result);
	}

	@Override
	public void subtract(int a, int b) {
		String result = String.format("%s - %s = %s", a, b, a - b);
		System.out.println(result);
	}

}

Our class implements the interface, just print the result of the add or subtract.

For now, we have our logic class. but now we want to do something before the method logic is going to execute. So the Before Advice is comming.

package spring.test.aop;

import java.lang.reflect.Method;

import org.springframework.aop.MethodBeforeAdvice;

public class MyBeforeAdvice implements MethodBeforeAdvice {

	@Override
	public void before(Method method, Object[] args, Object target) throws Throwable {
		System.out.println(String.format("This will be executed before the %s method", method.getName()));
	}
}

We print some messages in our Before Advice, this will be printed before the logic method result.

Finally, we need to make the logic class and our Before Advice are combined together. so we need to config them in the xml file.

<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN 2.0//EN"
			"http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans-2.0.dtd">

<beans>
	<bean id="myBeforeAdvice" class="spring.test.aop.MyBeforeAdvice"/>
	
	<bean id="myLogicClass" class="spring.test.aop.MyLogicClass"/>
	
	<bean id="proxyFactoryBean" class="org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyFactoryBean">
		<property name="proxyInterfaces" value="spring.test.aop.MyLogicInterface"/>
		<property name="interceptorNames">
			<list>
				<value>myBeforeAdvice</value>
			</list>
		</property>
		<property name="target" ref="myLogicClass"/>
	</bean>
</beans>

In AOP always we need to create a spring bean in the form of interface and implementation class only, because the IOC container internally creates proxy class by implementing that interface with the help of ProxyFactoryBean.
To run this application, we need a class which with main method. See below codes.

package spring.test.aop;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

public class App {

	private static ApplicationContext applicationContext;

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("springConfig.xml");
		MyLogicInterface myLogicInterface = (MyLogicInterface)applicationContext.getBean("proxyFactoryBean");
		
		myLogicInterface.add(10, 20);
		myLogicInterface.subtract(10, 5);
	}

}

In the client application, we are passing id of ProxyFactoryBean (proxyFactoryBean) to get the object, because we need proxyed object to invoke our logic method.

The result of the execution is below:

This will be executed before the add method
10 + 20 = 30
This will be executed before the subtract method
10 - 5 = 5

So, it is simple to use it. and we separated the logic and the services completely, only need to config the xml file when the services changed.