Sure, you could keep the parent just as you have. In your OP, it's not necessary and I haven't had enough coffee this morning to fully evaluate your response but in general keeping a reference like that is pretty much an OO code smell. A class that instantiates objects is normally a Factory but for most Factory classes, that's *all* they do - they do not have other behaviors.

However, I have reason to keep the Base object inside {Parent}, as there are other constructors which will be invoked by other methods in Lite class.

There's a better way to do that by making the constructor in the parent class subclass-friendly. This involves checking the first argument you get in an OO constructor routine and identifying if it has a valid ref() associated with it. If you write your constructors as my example code below shows, you'll be making life easy for anyone else who wants to built on your code base.

In the code below, note a couple of things:

1. Note that the $ex2 object in consumer.pl is created by using the constructor method of the $ex1 object, which is of the "Improved" subclass.
2. See how the Parent class uses the ref() call to correctly determine when a subclass is re-using the Parent's constructor method.

Here's the example code structure:

Thanks Apero,

The way you suggested can resolve the method calling issue. But this won't able to the make the {Parent} attributes shareable in different constructors in Lite in my case.

That said, with my Lite class, I might have

  $admin = MyTest::Lite -> asAdmin( $id );
  $user = MyTest::Lite -> asUser( $id );
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where a data dump will give something like:

  $admin => {
    Mode => 'Admin',
    CommonParentAttributes => {...}
  }, MyTest::Lite
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and

  $user => {
    Mode => 'User', 
    CommonParentAttributes => {...}
  }, MyTest::Lite
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I don't actually mind if Mode is written into the CommonParentAttributes (thus I don't need CommomParentAttributes at all) , but when $user is created, $admin's Mode will become 'User'