hi,
found some replies in the sun website closely related to your topic.
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You need to be accessing a specific instance of the inner class if you are going to use a non-static member of it.
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You cannot simply get an instance of an inner class. You only have the instance of the outer class to work with.
To solve this problem, you can do one of two things:
1) Move your inner class to a separate "outer" class (thus decoupling it from the outer class)
2) If you want to keep it as an inner class, add a "pass-through" method to the outer class which will place the call on the active instance of the inner class.
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Re: extending a nested class and parent access
> This is inconsistent with inheritance: you'd think
> that if you extend an inner class, you would inherit
> the abilities and characteristics of that inner class,
> just as you would in other cases of inheritance.
That's a rather facile way of looking at it. Here's another example that contradicts the above stmt: suppose there is a class A in package X that extends another class B in the same package X. Then class A can access any members of class B that are declared to permit package-friendly access. Now if you extend A by class A1 in package Y, then A1 does not have access to those members of class B.
Hope this helps. Hope i haven't confused you even more!!
-sandhya