Extending the Field Access Pointcuts of AspectJ to Arrays

Abstract

Join points and advices are two fundamental constructs of aspect-oriented programming languages. AspectJ provides a large set of useful pointcuts that enables aspect-oriented programmers to pick out target join points for advice weaving in a highly flexible manner. However, the field access pointcuts of AspectJ do not support array objects in full. When an element of an array field is set or referenced, the corresponding index values and assigned value are not exposed to the advice. This paper presents an extension of AspectJ’s field access pointcuts to arrays that exposes such useful context information. We have implemented this extension using the abc compiler for AspectJ. The core of our implementation is a finite-state machine based pointcut matcher that can handle arrays of multiple dimensions in a uniform way.