Work with annotations in Spring Framework

Annotations are a very useful feature in Java programming language and if you use Spring Framework than it can be also very easy to create annotation processor.

I expect you to be familiar with basics of annotations (read here). In this tutorial we'll create annotation for SLF4J. Here is the annotation code:

package uay.log;

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

@Target(ElementType.FIELD)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Documented
public @interface Log {

}

Now let's create annotation processor using Spring Framework capabilities:

package uay.log;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.beans.BeansException;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.config.BeanPostProcessor;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.util.ReflectionUtils;
import org.springframework.util.ReflectionUtils.FieldCallback;

@Component
public class LogProcessor implements BeanPostProcessor {
 public Object postProcessAfterInitialization(Object bean, String beanName)
            throws BeansException {
        return bean;
    }

    public Object postProcessBeforeInitialization(final Object bean, String beanName)
            throws BeansException {
        ReflectionUtils.doWithFields(bean.getClass(), new FieldCallback() {
            public void doWith(Field field) throws IllegalArgumentException, IllegalAccessException {
                if (field.getAnnotation(Log.class) != null) {
                    Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(bean.getClass());
                    field.setAccessible(true);
                    field.set(bean, log);
                    field.setAccessible(false);
                }
            }
        });
        return bean;
    }
}

And it's that easy. Now we can use this annotation in our code:

@Log
Logger log;