Description Jacques 2009-11-10 15:34:02 EST

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 GTB6
Build Identifier: 1.6.5

I am working on IDEA with the aspectj weaver plugin that allows to
weave aspects incrementally as code is modified (not as good as
eclipse but better than ant :-) )
The plugin is directly calling aspectj api classes mainly through
BcelWeaver. It uses aspectj 1.6.5.
By default the plugin is taking the entire project classpath to find
aspects. Unbeknownst to me it took an old version of aspectlib.jar
1.5.3 included as part of testing tool not even used in the production
system.
Unfortunately it picked the compiled aspects that are included with
it. While pre-processing all application compiled classes and aspects
it choked on these old aspects and threw a BCException. Here is what I
had to work with to troubleshoot the problem:

2009-09-22 17:23:29,695 [ 153761]  ERROR -
llij.aop.aspectj.AspectJWeaver - malformed org.aspectj.weaver.Declare
attribute (length:80)org.aspectj.weaver.BCException: unknown
TypePattern kind: 0


org.aspectj.weaver.BCException: malformed org.aspectj.weaver.Declare
attribute (length:80)org.aspectj.weaver.BCException: unknown
TypePattern kind: 0


       at org.aspectj.weaver.AjAttribute.read(AjAttribute.java:131)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.Utility.readAjAttributes(Utility.java:98)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.BcelObjectType.ensureAspectJAttributesUnpacked(BcelObjectType.java:355)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.BcelObjectType.<init>(BcelObjectType.java:146)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.BcelWorld.buildBcelDelegate(BcelWorld.java:371)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.BcelWorld.resolveDelegate(BcelWorld.java:366)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.World.resolveToReferenceType(World.java:384)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.World.resolve(World.java:278)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.World.resolve(World.java:192)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.BcelObjectType.getSuperclass(BcelObjectType.java:210)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.ReferenceType.getSuperclass(ReferenceType.java:821)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.ResolvedType.getDirectSupertypes(ResolvedType.java:67)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.ReferenceType.isAssignableFrom(ReferenceType.java:520)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.ReferenceType.isAssignableFrom(ReferenceType.java:363)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.CrosscuttingMembersSet.addOrReplaceDescendantsOf(CrosscuttingMembersSet.java:107)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.CrosscuttingMembersSet.addOrReplaceAspect(CrosscuttingMembersSet.java:93)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.CrosscuttingMembersSet.addOrReplaceAspect(CrosscuttingMembersSet.java:59)
       at org.aspectj.weaver.bcel.BcelWeaver.prepareForWeave(BcelWeaver.java:517)
       at se.expertsystem.intellij.aop.aspectj.AspectJWeaver.internalWeave(AspectJWeaver.java:198)

There is no mention of what class is the culprit. This is as helpful
as our old and beloved NPE :-P
I had to get the source of the plugin, install it with a version of
IDEA devkit, debug my real project and stop the debugger on that
exception in order to get the name of that class! Not really user
friendly and obviously beyond the standard programmer's time and
skills.
Therefore I would strongly suggest that you insert at key places
catches that wrap the exception with useful contextual info and
rethrow it.
I would also try to make it so that tools like this plugin may devise
compensating mechanism. If aspectj would give a semantically rich
exception like InvalidAspectException with the fq name of the class in
question and where it came from (what jar...), the plugin could try to
work around the problem by proposing to remove the offending aspect.

.



Reproducible: Always