Hi guys,

Say I have a class "Owner," which is to own another class "Database."
Database owns an aggregation of another class "Record."  Owner is to
live for the length of the program, so the others will as well.

When programmers use my code I want to force them to go through Owner
and Database to get their Record instances.  In C++ I could do this by
making Database's constructor private and making Owner a friend.  I can
do the same to ensure only Database can construct an instance of
Record.

I can almost replicate this behaviour in Java using packages and by
making the relevent constructors package-visible only.

However this does not allow Record's constructor to be invisible to
Owner, and if I have many Database and Record classes all owned by
Owner then the problem increases.

There must be some natty trick to do this, but I can't think of it:
Any pointers?

Cheers,
Andrew F.