Do Swift inner classes have access to self of outer class?

Question

I'm coming from a Java background where when you declare the inner class, it's either static, and doesn't have access to the instance of the outer class, or it's not static, and can access the instance of the outer class that's being operated on. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_class#Types_of_nested_classes_in_Java

Does Swift have any concept of this? From my testing, I cannot seem to get access to the Outer's self object, but I definitely could be doing something wrong.

class Outer {     let value = ""     class Inner {         func foo() {             let bar = value // 'Outer.Type' does not have a member named 'value'         }     } } 

Answer 1

AFAIK, you can't access the outer class out-of-the-box.

But what you can do is:

class Outer {      let value = ""     var inner = Inner()      class Inner {          weak var parent: Outer! = nil          func foo() {             let bar = parent.value         }      }      init() {         inner.parent = self     }  } 

Or:

class Outer {      class Inner {          unowned let parent: Outer          init(parent: Outer) {             self.parent = parent         }      }      let value = ""     var inner: Inner! = nil      init() {         inner = Inner(parent: self)     }  } 

Answer 2

Nested types don't have any special access to the types that contain them. But I don't think that's all that's going on here. You seem to be a little fuzzy on classes versus instances.

value is a property of the Outer class. That means each instance of Outer has its own value. Inner is a separate class that exists in the namespace of Outer. So when you write let bar = value, there is no such thing as value to access, because that only exists in instances of Outer, and we don't have any instances at hand. If it were a class property, you could do let bar = Outer.value.