Is it possible to hide or lower access to Inherited Methods in Java?

Question

I have a class structure where I would like some methods in a base class to be accessible from classes derived directly from the base class, but not classes derived from der

Answer 1

I think the very nature of the problem as you've posed it exposes conceptual problems with your object model. You are trying to describe various separate responsibilities as "is a" relationships when actually what you should be doing is describing "has a" or "uses a" relationships. The very fact that you want to hide base class functionality from a child class tells me this problem doesn't actually map onto a three-tiered inheritance tree.

It sounds like you're describing a classic ORM problem. Let's look at this again and see if we can re-map it onto other concepts than strict "is a" inheritance, because I really think your problem isn't technical, it's conceptual:

You said:

The base class is the base table class managing the database handling part of it. There is a fair amount of functionality contained in it that is common to all table types - as once they are in the database they become uniform.

This could be more clear, but it sounds like we have one class that needs to manage the DB connection and common db operations. Following Single Responsibility, I think we're done here. You don't need to extend this class, you need to hand it to a class that needs to use its functionality.

The middle class is specific to the kind of table in the file being parsed, and has the table parsing and import logic. It needs access to some of the base class's database access functions.

The "middle class" here sounds a bit like a Data Mapper. This class doesn't need to extend the previous class, it needs to own a reference to it, perhaps injected on the constructor or a setter as an interface.

The top level class is specific to the table and does nothing more than initialize the table's layout in a way the parent classes can understand. Also users of the base class do not need to see or access the database specific functions which the middle class do. In essence, I want to reveal these functions only to one level above the base class and no one else.

I'm not clear why a high-level class seems to have knowledge of the db schema (at least that's what the phrase "initialize the table's layout" suggests to me), but again, if the relationship between the first two classes were encapsulation ("has a"/"uses a") instead of inheritance ("is a"), I don't think this would be a problem.