Nesting Development Components

An inner or child component always belongs exclusively to the enclosing or parent component. This implies that a component cannot be the child component of two different parent components at the same time. The nesting of DCs also influences the use of the public parts. For more information, see Public Part Entity Reference.

An inner development component may be further decomposed into components, which allows you to build component hierarchies of arbitrary complexity. A development component that is not enclosed in any other component is called a top-level DC. The diagram below shows the inner structure of a development component.

Nested DCs.

Changing the Enclosure Relations

The inclusion relations between components are not static and may change over time. A component may become an included component, or an included component may loose its enclosing component. In the following figure, an inner component is removed from a stack of nested components:

Changing the nesting of DCs.

Changes to a component hierarchy are usually costly, because they change the structure of a software. In the example above, removing the component might involve changes to dependency relations.