Using Spring AOP with Grails Services

If you try to work with Spring AOP and service classes in a Grails application, you will probably end up with an exception like:

Error executing script TestApp: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException:
Error creating bean with name 'testService':
Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is org.springframework.aop.framework.AopConfigException: Could not generate CGLIB subclass of class [class $Proxy11]: Common causes of this problem include using a final class or a non-visible class;
nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot subclass final class class $Proxy11

To solve this problem you have to add the following line to your resources.xml (in grails-app/conf/spring):

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy proxy-target-class="true"/>

Your final resources.xml will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.0.xsd">

 <aop:aspectj-autoproxy proxy-target-class="true"/> 
 
</beans>

This was tested with Grails 1.2.2 and Grails 1.3.0.