Can we get rid of bean definition for Aspects using Spring-AOP

Question

My Aspect is as follows:

@Aspect
public class SomeAspect{
    //define pointcuts
    // define Advices pertaining to pointcuts
}

My aspect-config xml file:

<?xml ...?>
  <beans ...
   xmlns:aop
   xmlns:context ..>
      <bean id="someAspect" class="...SomeAspect"/>
      <aop:aspectj-autoproxy />

  </beans>

This runs perfectly fine

What I require:

I want to get rid of writing bean definition for each Aspect as shown above in my config xml file.

I tried the following:

Added @Component on SomeAspect and in xml added <context-component-scan> with respective package containing my Aspect hoping that my class gets picked up as a Bean and as an Aspect. However, my Aspect was not getting picked up at all.

Any pointers?

Answer 1

The context:component-scan element has a sub-element which you can use to include annotation classes to use to be picked up by the scan.

Take a look at the context:include-filter element, and its attributes.

<context:component-scan base-package="my.package.to.scan">
    <context:include-filter type="annotation" expression="org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect"/>
</context:component-scan>

I would think what you tried would have work, but without seeing it exactly as you did it, it is hard to say for sure.