[CXF-8210] Incompatibility with recent Brave versions causes NullPointerException and hides root cause

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.3.5, 3.2.12
• Fix Version/s: 3.3.6, 3.2.13, 3.4.0
• Component/s: Tracing Brave
• Estimated Complexity: Unknown
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Tim Peeters
• Created: 10/Feb/20 21:22
• Updated: 22/Dec/21 20:43
• Resolved: 11/Feb/20 02:54

Description

I believe there is an incompatibility between cxf-integration-tracing-brave and recent versions of brave-instrumentation-http.
CXF master currently depends on Brave version 5.6.9 while the newest version is 5.9.4.

As of version 5.7, brave-instrumentation-http throws a NullPointerException when invoking{{ brave.http.HttpClientHandler.create(HttpTracing, HttpClientAdapter)}} with a null value for the HttpClientAdapter parameter.
Which is exactly what cxf-integration-tracing-brave does in case of an exception/SOAP fault.

This results in the following stack trace and hides the original SOAP fault from the user:

java.lang.NullPointerException: adapter == null
 at brave.http.HttpClientHandler.create(HttpClientHandler.java:64)
 at org.apache.cxf.tracing.brave.AbstractBraveClientProvider.stopTraceSpan(AbstractBraveClientProvider.java:126)
 at org.apache.cxf.tracing.brave.BraveClientStartInterceptor.handleFault(BraveClientStartInterceptor.java:55)
 at org.apache.cxf.phase.PhaseInterceptorChain.unwind(PhaseInterceptorChain.java:499)

Users of Spring Cloud Greenwich SR3 or higher are impacted.
Dependency graph from left to right with indication of the impacted versions:

Spring Boot	Spring Cloud	Sleuth	Brave	Status
2.1	Greenwich.RELEASE	2.1.0.RELEASE	5.6.1	Works
2.1	Greenwich.SR1	2.1.1.RELEASE	5.6.1	Works
2.1	Greenwich.SR2	2.1.2.RELEASE	5.6.5	Works
2.1	Greenwich.SR3	2.1.3.RELEASE	5.7.0	*Broken*
2.1	Greenwich.SR4	2.1.6.RELEASE	5.8.0	*Broken*
2.1	Greenwich.SR5	2.1.7.RELEASE	5.9.2	*Broken*
2.2	Hoxton.RELEASE	2.2.0.RELEASE	5.9.0	*Broken*
2.2	Hoxton.SR1	2.2.1.RELEASE	5.9.0	*Broken*