Andy O'Neill (Migrated from SEC-1954) said:

Javadocs claim that this method is protected, but it is actually protected final. This is also in contradiction with the javadoc comment: "Allows subclasses to actually retrieve the UserDetails from an implementation-specific location, with the option of throwing an AuthenticationException immediately if the presented credentials are incorrect (this is especially useful if it is necessary to bind to a resource as the user in order to obtain or generate a UserDetails)."

http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/docs/3.0.x/apidocs/

Comment From: spring-projects-issues

Luke Taylor said:

The Javadoc says:

"Description copied from class: AbstractUserDetailsAuthenticationProvider"

so it refers to the base class. You should extend that class if you want to provide a custom implementation.

Comment From: spring-projects-issues

Rob Winch said:

As Luke mentioned, this indicates the documentation is from the superclass

Comment From: App-Teck

Now its not final :)

Comment From: 25khattab

Small question, can I get an explanation why is the method declared final, I don't get the benefit of being final especially if I want just to override this method. I'm new to spring security sorry if that question is kind of dumb