can a subclass method determine if called by superclass?

Peter peter.milliken at gmail.com
Wed Jan 4 17:42:52 EST 2012


Situation: I am subclassing a class which has methods that call other
class methods (and without reading the code of the superclass I am
discovering these by trial and error as I build the subclass - this is
probably why I may have approached the problem from the wrong
viewpoint :-)).

Problem: when overriding one of these "indirectly called" superclass
methods I would like to take differing actions (in the subclass
instance) depending on whether it is the superclass or the subclass
instance performing the call.

Question: Is there any way to determine in a method whether it is
being called by the superclass or by a method of the subclass
instance?

Now I suspect that what I am doing is actually very muddy thinking :-)
and I don't want to attempt to explain why I am approaching the design
this way as an explanation would require too much work - I will
consider an alternative inheritance approach while waiting an answer,
but the answer to the question interested me (even if I do a redesign
and come up with a more "elegant" approach to the problem).

Thanks
Peter



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