Is fine grained control of aspectj-autoproxy possible in spring ?

Question

If I just add <aop:aspectj-autoproxy proxy-target-class="false"/> to the start of my spring context, every single bean that implements an interface gets a JDK proxy. I would really like to limit the proxying A) to classes that actually need proxies or B) classes that I specify as needing proxies.

I tried using the aop:scoped-proxy stanza within an xml bean defintion for the beans that need proxies, but it turns out this does not seem to give me aop-advice.

I also tried adding <aop:aspectj-autoproxy ....> near the end of my spring xml file, but before adding all the beans that need proxies, but it does not seem to work properly.

I have a lot of beans with interfaces but only a (well defined) handful need AoP advice, and those proxies are messing up my stacktraces big time. (I have peeked at spring 3.0 and suspect it's going to be possible there but it seems like it's a while away).

Is this possible in 2.5.X ?

Answer 1

As can be seen in AbstractAdvisorAutoProxyCreator.java line 67 (Spring 2.5.6), the autoproxy creator really only does what I ask it to. It does not autoproxy more than it thinks necessary.

It turns out it's the kind of pointcut expression you use greatly influences how much proxying this class does; the annotation I was using was

@Around(value="@target(myannotation)")

This basically means spring generates a proxy that decides to intercept based on the type of the actual invocation target. The downside of this is that spring tries to do this with all available beans in the applicationcontext. If I'd been using something like@within instead, spring would be using the interface to decide if autoproxying should take place, and this can statically be determined at the time the applicationcontext is built.

So now I only have two classes that are proxied ;)