Why is Cobertura not working in my Spring/Hibernate Webapp?

Question

I want to use Cobertura code coverage recording in my web application, but can't get it to work. I suspect, the problem is some conflict between Spring or Hibernate and Cobertura since all three use the ASM lib to do their byte code manipulation.

I did the following:

I used the Cobertura Ant task to instrument my jars in "WEB-INF/lib" and generated the "cobertura.ser" file
I added the "cobertura.jar" to "WEB-INF/lib"
I start tomcat providing cobertura file location (net.sourceforge.cobertura.datafile=cobertura.ser)

When I start Tomcat, I get the following error message when the Spring context is initialized:

java.lang.NoSuchMethodException: com.foo.MyClass.setInstance($Proxy28)
  at com.foo.common.runtime.spring.PluginInjector.findBestMatchingMethod(PluginInjector.java:252)
  at com.foo.common.runtime.spring.PluginInjector.invokeMethod(PluginInjector.java:198)
  at com.foo.common.runtime.spring.PluginInjector.afterPropertiesSet(PluginInjector.java:174)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.invokeInitMethods(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1514)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1452)

I'm already aware, that the asm.jar that comes with cobertura should not be in the classpath and therefore I only copied cobertura.jar to WEB-INF\lib.

Besides, I also tried Emma and it worked. However, cobertura looks more modern, active (last update from 2010 instead of 2005) and generates nicer reports so I would prefer it over Emma.

Tim Büthe Tim Büthe · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-06T10:28:29

I had to make two changes, to make this work:

I had to set proxy-target-class="true" in the Spring configuration, so Spring uses CGLIB to generate proxies instead of using JDK dynamic proxies (see Spring Proxying mechanisms).
I had to set the JVM Parameter -XX:-UseSplitVerifier, which causes the JVM to use the old byte code verifier. This seems to be necessary since Cobertura's byte code manipulation is incompatible with Java 7.

Why is Cobertura not working in my Spring/Hibernate Webapp?

1 Answers