SpEL maven plugin

This plugin scans your class files looking for the configured annotations and then validating any Spring Expressions that you have in the annotations.

What is this plugin meant to do?

Find syntax errors in expressions that you might not otherwise find until runtime
Basic static analysis on the expressions to see if they're correcting invoke a context root's method.

Types of validation

Parse the expression into a SpelExpression
Optionally validate any top level method references to the configured context root.
Does not validate Bean References @myBean.foo or Variables #foo.bar and likely won't ever
Does not currently validate Type References T(fully.qualified.name.Type).isFoo() but these seem like a good candidate to add next.

How it works

The plugin uses the classpath for the project in order to load the configured annotations and optional root contexts.
The Reflections API https://github.com/ronmamo/reflections is used to locate all methods annotated with the configured annotations
Each annotation is checked to see if its configured attribute has a string value
The string value is parsed into a SpelExpression or recorded as an error it it fails.
If a context root was configured for the annotation, then we'll also scan the SpelExpression for any top level method references to see if they resolve against the root.
A summary of the number of annotations tested, passed, and failed is available in target/spel-maven-plugin/report.json.

Example

Validate Spring's PreAuthorize annotation

  <plugin>
      <groupId>com.massfords</groupId>
      <artifactId>spel-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>1.0</version>
      <configuration>
          <failOnError>false</failOnError>
          <annotations>
              <SpelAnnotation>
                  <name>org.springframework.security.access.prepost.PreAuthorize</name>
                  <expressionRoot>org.springframework.security.access.expression.SecurityExpressionRoot</expressionRoot>
              </SpelAnnotation>
          </annotations>
      </configuration>
      <executions>
          <execution>
              <id>spel-plugin-integration</id>
              <phase>process-classes</phase>
              <goals>
                  <goal>spel</goal>
              </goals>
          </execution>
      </executions>
  </plugin>

To build this project:

mvn clean install

To build this project with plugin integration tests

mvn clean install -Prun-its

Issues, Contributing

Please post any issues on the Github's Issue tracker. Pull requests are welcome!

License

Apache 2.0

massfords / spel-maven-plugin