Access parent class from instance of nested class

Question

Hi,
I have the following class hierarchy:
public class BaseClass
public class ParentClass
  private NestedClass    mNestedClass;
  public ParentClass()
    mNestedClass = new NestedClass();
  protected NestedClass getNestedClass()
    return mNestedClass;
  public static BaseClass createParentClass()
    parentClass = new ParentClass();
    // some code...
    return parentClass.getNestedClass();
  protected class NestedClass extends BaseClass
    NestedClass( int i )
      // some other code...
}I cannot modify the classes above, as they are third-party and they are subject to changes...
In my code, I may only use the static method to create an instance of ParentClass, because there is some important code (not accessible outside of the package) instead of the comments. The problem is that the static method only returns me an instance of the NestedClass, but not the ParentClass. For some reasons, I would need to access the instance of ParentClass.
Is there a way (Java syntax, I mean) that would allow me to access from an instance of NestedClass the corresponding ParentClass instance?
I know that inside a NestedClass method I may use ParentClass.this, but, as I wrote above, that class cannot be modified. Worse, I am not able to extend it neither, because the constructor is not public (or at least protected)...
Please, does anybody have the correct answer?
Thanks,
Adrian

Answer 1

There are at least 3 funny things in the code you posted:
1) an instance of NestedClass cannot be created with "new NestedClass()", because the only constructor is NestedClass(int)
2) I can't see why a method called "createParentClass" should return an instance of NestedClass
3) The funniest: I really can't understand why you "may only use the static method to create an instance of ParentClass": if the ParentClass developer didn't want you to instantiate it directly, why did he made the constructor public?
But the fact is there's no way to access the enclosing object of a nested object if the sw architect didn't want this (maybe including in the interface a method like this:
class EnclosingClass {
  class NestedClass {
   EnclosingClass getEnclosingObject() {
    return EnclosingClass.this;
This simply should break encapsulation and object hyerarchy security... really a bad thing I guess!!
Bye