Using Aspectj and Java Annotations to Try Again

We are working on a program that interacts with a hardware device using a com port for some months. After implementing many parts of software, we found that the communication channel is not as reliable as we expected, so we decided to add some "Try Again" functionality to our code. You have seen the "Try Again" dialog many times, but have you ever taught of how to implement one?

All you need is to invoke a method, if an exception occurs ask the user "Try Again?" and if the answer is "Yes" reinvoke the method. At first it seems so simple to me but after playing with some of OO design patterns I realized that many lines of code should be modified to implement the functionality in OO, so I decided to play a little AOP.

Here is the solution I found:

The first thing we need is to specify what methods must be tried again, Thanks to Java 5 annotations, this is very easy to tag some methods, so the first thing we need is a TryAgain Java annotation:

 
 

package com.blogspot.zoftware.aspects;     import java.lang.annotation.ElementType; import java.lang.annotation.Retention; import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy; import java.lang.annotation.Target;     @Target(ElementType.METHOD) @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) public @interface TryAgain { int count() default 2; boolean interactive() default true; }

 
 

The count parameter specifies how many times the method should be reinvoked and the interactive parameter specifies if the user should be asked to try again or not. The second thing we need is an aspect which reinvokes the annotated methods, there are many AOP implementations in the java world but I like the annotation based aspectj the most, as it is very simple and supports standard java syntax, here is the code for the aspect:

 
 

package com.blogspot.zoftware.aspects;     import java.lang.reflect.Method;     import javax.swing.JOptionPane;     import org.aspectj.lang.ProceedingJoinPoint; import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Around; import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect; import org.aspectj.lang.reflect.MethodSignature;     @Aspect public class TryAgainAspect {     @Around("call(@TryAgain * *..*(..))") public Object retry(ProceedingJoinPoint jp) throws Throwable{ Method method = ((MethodSignature)jp.getSignature()).getMethod(); TryAgain annotation = method.getAnnotation(TryAgain.class); Throwable err = null;     for (int i = 0; i < annotation.count(); i++) { try { return jp.proceed(); } catch (Throwable e) { err = e; if(annotation.interactive() && !askRetry(e)) { break; } } }     throw err; }     private boolean askRetry(Throwable e) { String msg = "The following error occured:\n" + e + "\nRetry?"; return JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(null, msg) == JOptionPane.YES_OPTION; } }

 

 
 

The retry advice, reinvokes every method which is tagged with @TryAgain annotation if an exception occurs (at most count times), so all you need to use this mechanism is to tag the methods that should be reinvoked on failures. Here is a sample usage:

 
 

package com.blogspot.zoftware.demo;     import com.blogspot.zoftware.aspects.TryAgain;     public class Foo {     @TryAgain(count = 3) public void oftenFails() { if(Math.random() < 0.6) { throw new RuntimeException("Sorry, Failed!"); } }     public static void main(String[] args) { new Foo().oftenFails(); System.out.println("Passed"); } }

 

 
 

The oftenFails method is the method that should be reinvoked, so I annotated it using @TryAgain. To run the code you need aspectj libraries (download here); you can use either dynamic (load time) or static weaving. To use load time weaving, place the following piece of XML into aop.xml under META-INF folder, then run the Foo class with -javaagent:aspectjweaver.jar command line argument.

 
 

<aspects> <aspect name="com.blogspot.zoftware.aspects.TryAgainAspect" /> </aspects>

 

The mixture of Annotations and AspectJ is a powerful tool to solve many common software engineering problems.