Introductions

Introductions (known as inter-type declarations in AspectJ) enable an aspect to declare that advised objects implement a given interface, and to provide an implementation of that interface on behalf of those objects.

You can make an introduction by using the @DeclareParents annotation. This annotation is used to declare that matching types have a new parent (hence the name). For example, given an interface named UsageTracked and an implementation of that interface named DefaultUsageTracked, the following aspect declares that all implementors of service interfaces also implement the UsageTracked interface (e.g. for statistics via JMX):

Java

@Aspect
public class UsageTracking {

  @DeclareParents(value="com.xyz.service.*+", defaultImpl=DefaultUsageTracked.class)
  public static UsageTracked mixin;

  @Before("execution(* com.xyz..service.*.*(..)) && this(usageTracked)")
  public void recordUsage(UsageTracked usageTracked) {
    usageTracked.incrementUseCount();
  }

}

The interface to be implemented is determined by the type of the annotated field. The value attribute of the @DeclareParents annotation is an AspectJ type pattern. Any bean of a matching type implements the UsageTracked interface. Note that, in the before advice of the preceding example, service beans can be directly used as implementations of the UsageTracked interface. If accessing a bean programmatically, you would write the following:

Java

UsageTracked usageTracked = context.getBean("myService", UsageTracked.class);