Inheritance Inheritance is a special relationship between classes that exploits the commonality in managed object class definitions. A subclass inherits all characteristics of all of its subclasses. There is one basic managed object class, top , and all other classes are subclasses of top . The classes are more specialized going down the inheritance tree.
Inheritance is used in specifying object classes.
A new object class is specified as a subclass of a defined class. Once a class has been designed and formally specified, the class is given a globally unique registered identifier which is used in communications. This capability is known as polymorphism. In some cases, it may be necessary for implementation reasons to restrict the set of superclasses that an instance can imitate.