Description Harald Radi 2010-03-24 04:39:39 EDT

Build Identifier: 1.6.8

The pointcut keeps a reference to a world instance that holds the context classloader at the time of creating the pointcut. When that pointcut is later tried to be matched with a class that originates from a different classloader I get "warning can't determine annotations of missing type <classname>
 [Xlint:cantFindType]" although the class instance is already available at that time.

To be more precise this happens in conjunction with the spring framework when having multiple contexts and per context classloaders. I really don't know whom to blame here as the root problem might as well be how spring manages pointcut definitions, but I had an extensive skype chat with Juergen on that and we concluded that this might be easiest fixed in aspectj.

Spring calls PointcutExpression.couldMatchJoinPointsInType(Class aClass) and already passes a valid class instance. PointcutExpressionImpl:80 then tries to reload that class with the classloader of the pointcut definition by calling world.resolve(aClass.getName()) - which obviously fails.

As a workaround i just added

if (matchType instanceof MissingResolvedTypeWithKnownSignature) {
  world = new ReflectionWorld(aClass.getClassLoader());
  matchType = world.resolve(aClass.getName());
}

below that, which worked as a naive quick fix. Nevertheless, I presume you are doing this to avoid keeping references to foreign class instances and their classloaders, so I can't tell the implications of that workaround.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. application context C1 holds a pointcut definition P1 and uses classloader L1 as bean class loader

2. application context C2 is a subcontext of C1 and uses classloader L2 as bean class loader; L2 uses L1 as parent class loader (L2 hence contains a superset of the classes in L1)

3. C2 contains a bean definition for a bean that is only visible to L2 but matches P1 (e.g. a @within pointcut for an annotation visible to L1)