When you start messing around with Spring's auto-proxy stuff, you often run into this behaviour as documented:
Classes that implement the BeanPostProcessor interface are special, and so they are treated differently by the container. All BeanPostProcessors and their directly referenced beans will be instantiated on startup, as part of the special startup phase of the ApplicationContext, then all those BeanPostProcessors will be registered in a sorted fashion - and applied to all further beans. Since AOP auto-proxying is implemented as a BeanPostProcessor itself, no BeanPostProcessors or directly referenced beans are eligible for auto-proxying (and thus will not have aspects 'woven' into them.
For any such bean, you should see an info log message: “Bean 'foo' is not eligible for getting processed by all BeanPostProcessors (for example: not eligible for auto-proxying)”.
In other words, if I write my own BeanPostProcessor, and that class directly references other beans in the context, then those referenced beans will not be eligible for auto-proxying, and a message is logged to that effect.
My problem is that tracking down where that direct reference is can be very difficult, since the "direct reference" can in fact be a chain of transitive dependencies that ends up taking in half the beans in the application context. All Spring gives you is that single info message, and it's not really much help, beyond telling you when a bean has been caught in this web of references.
The BeanPostProcessor I'm developing does have direct references to other beans, but it's a very limited set of references. Despite this, pretty much every bean in my context is then being excluded from being auto-proxied, according to the log messages, but I can't see where that dependency is happening.
Has anyone found a better way of tracking this down?