Apply Spring AOP to beans from different application context

Question

Is it possible to apply Spring AOP to beans that were declared in an application context different from which AOP config is taking place? I have 2 application contexts: dataApplicationContext.xml and webApplicationContext.xml . I would like to declare an aspect in webApplicationContext.xml to intercept method executions of beans that are defined in dataApplicationContext.xml

dataApplicationContext.xml is included in the main applicationContext.xml context file which is booted from main(String args[]) entry point. webApplicationContext.xml is loaded separetly by ContextLoaderListener which is deployed in an embedded instance of Jetty.

ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext( new String[] { "applicationContext.xml"} );
ctx.registerShutdownHook();

Server server = ctx.getBean(Server.class);

DispatcherServlet dispatcherServlet = new DispatcherServlet();
          dispatcherServlet.setContextConfigLocation("classpath:webApplicationContext.xml");

ServletHolder servletHolder = new ServletHolder(dispatcherServlet);
ServletContextHandler context = new ServletContextHandler();
context.setContextPath("/");
context.addEventListener(new ContextLoaderListener());
context.setInitParameter("contextConfigLocation", 
      "classpath*:**/webApplicationContext.xml");
context.addServlet(servletHolder, "/*");
context.setSessionHandler(new SessionHandler());

Thanks.

Answer 1

If your spring application loads both context-files it should work out of the box. If not, you have 2 options:

• Make a parent context-file that includes both context-files.
• Include one context file from the other one. So in this case, I'm assuming that your webApplicationContext.xml will have an include of the dataApplicationContext.xml.

Answer 2

You can definately do that provided your dataApplicationContext.xml is loaded using the org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener and your webApplicationContext.xml is loaded using the DispatcherServlet

The reason being, by default the Spring container creates two contexts. the root application context and each Dispatched Servlet has its own web application context .

The spring documentation clearly mentions this

As detailed in the section entitled Section 3.8, “The ApplicationContext”, ApplicationContext instances in Spring can be scoped. In the web MVC framework, each DispatcherServlet has its own WebApplicationContext, which inherits all the beans already defined in the root WebApplicationContext. These inherited beans defined can be overridden in the servlet-specific scope, and new scope-specific beans can be defined local to a given servlet instance.

And hence, the bean definitions that you would specify in your root application context can be accessed by your dispatcher servlet's webapplication context

In your case, provided the first line is true, you can access the AOP declaration from the webApplicationContext.xml since this is your web context and it can access the root context.