Accessing outer class members from within an inner class extending the outer class itself

Question

In the code snippet shown below, an inner class inherits an outer class itself.

package test;

class TestInnerClass {

    private String value;

    public          


        

Answer 1

The other answers have explained well why you are getting the results you see (you have two instances of TestInnerClass and are accessing the first), however there is actually a way to access the private members of TestInnerClass in its subclass - the keyword super.

If you replace your showValue method with this:

public void showValue() {
    System.out.println(super.getValue());
    System.out.println(super.value);
}

You will get the output that you expected.

I would also suggest that if you decide to do this you make InnerClass a static inner class because it no longer needs a reference to an instance of its outer class.