@EntityListeners Annotation Causes TypeNotPresentExceptionProxy Error

I have a JPA entity that looks something like this. Note the @EntityListeners annotation:

import javax.persistence.EntityListeners;
import org.springframework.data.jpa.domain.support.AuditingEntityListener;

@XmlRootElement
@MappedSuperclass
@EntityListeners( { AuditingEntityListener.class } )
public class BaseEntity implements Serializable
{
    //body
}

I'm using Hibernate as the JPA provider.

I use Spring's LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean to create the JPA EntityManager. I use the setPersistenceUnitPostProcessors method to set a PersistenceUnitPostProcessor instance that registers the entity classes in the postProcessPersistenceUnitInfo method. (I know it's not Spring Boot, but that's a topic for another time).

After setting a DataSource and other properties on the LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean, calling the afterPropertiesSet method throws this exception:

java.lang.ArrayStoreException: sun.reflect.annotation.TypeNotPresentExceptionProxy
    at sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseClassArray(AnnotationParser.java:724)
    at sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseArray(AnnotationParser.java:531)
    at sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseMemberValue(AnnotationParser.java:355)
    at sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseAnnotation2(AnnotationParser.java:286)
    at sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseAnnotations2(AnnotationParser.java:120)
    at sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseAnnotations(AnnotationParser.java:72)
    at java.lang.Class.createAnnotationData(Class.java:3521)
    at java.lang.Class.annotationData(Class.java:3510)
    at java.lang.Class.getAnnotation(Class.java:3415)
    at java.lang.reflect.AnnotatedElement.isAnnotationPresent(AnnotatedElement.java:258)
    at java.lang.Class.isAnnotationPresent(Class.java:3425)
    at org.hibernate.annotations.common.reflection.java.JavaAnnotationReader.isAnnotationPresent(JavaAnnotationReader.java:50)
    at org.hibernate.annotations.common.reflection.java.JavaXAnnotatedElement.isAnnotationPresent(JavaXAnnotatedElement.java:60)
    at org.hibernate.boot.model.source.internal.annotations.AnnotationMetadataSourceProcessorImpl.categorizeAnnotatedClass(AnnotationMetadataSourceProcessorImpl.java:116)
    at org.hibernate.boot.model.source.internal.annotations.AnnotationMetadataSourceProcessorImpl.<init>(AnnotationMetadataSourceProcessorImpl.java:105)
    at org.hibernate.boot.model.process.spi.MetadataBuildingProcess$1.<init>(MetadataBuildingProcess.java:147)
    at org.hibernate.boot.model.process.spi.MetadataBuildingProcess.complete(MetadataBuildingProcess.java:141)
    at org.hibernate.jpa.boot.internal.EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.metadata(EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.java:858)
    at org.hibernate.jpa.boot.internal.EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.build(EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.java:885)
    at org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.SpringHibernateJpaPersistenceProvider.createContainerEntityManagerFactory(SpringHibernateJpaPersistenceProvider.java:60)
    at org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean.createNativeEntityManagerFactory(LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean.java:353)
    at org.springframework.orm.jpa.AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.buildNativeEntityManagerFactory(AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.java:370)
    at org.springframework.orm.jpa.AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.afterPropertiesSet(AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.java:359)

I commented out @EntityListeners( { AuditingEntityListener.class } ) annotation on the entity class listed above.

After that, the LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean's afterPropertiesSet() method did not throw an error, and it produced a usable EntityManager instance (I was able to use it to do a basic select of an entity). So, at least I know that the rest of the setup works correctly.

Can anybody tell me why I'm getting the error when using the @EntityListeners annotation, and how I can fix it? As far as I can tell it's in the runtime classpath (the javax.persistence-api-2.2.jar file is in the webapp's WEB-INF/lib directory) and so is the AuditingEntityListener class (in the spring-data-jpa-1.11.6.RELEASE.jar file).

If it's helpful, these are the Gradle entries I'm using to get the dependencies:

compile "org.springframework:spring-core:4.3.7.RELEASE"
compile "org.springframework:spring-beans:4.3.7.RELEASE"
compile "org.springframework:spring-context:4.3.7.RELEASE"

compile "org.springframework.data:spring-data-jpa:1.11.6.RELEASE"
compile "javax.persistence:javax.persistence-api:2.2"
compile "org.hibernate:hibernate-core:5.2.10.Final"

What can I do to get rid of the error when using the @EntityListeners annotation?

Thank you!!!

I did some more testing. I found that this annotation did not produce an error:

@EntityListeners( { } )

So the AuditingEntityListener appeared to be the culprit.

More web searching turned up this issue in Spring. It mentioned the spring-aspectsproject as being necessary for the runtime code weaving of AuditingEntityListener, so I added this to my Gradle build file:

compile "org.springframework:spring-aspects:4.3.10.RELEASE"

After a rebuild and redeploy the problem went away! Yay!