Folder Structure
All development components (DCs) are stored in a shared folder named DCs. Under DCs , you create folders for the different vendors of components. The folder names are created from the vendor ID of the DC (for example, sap.com , example.org and so on). This separates the DCs of different vendors also physically in the file system.
Below the vendor folder, the DC tree starts. Every segment of a DC name is mapped to a folder. Under the folder hierarchy of a DC, you find the reserved folder _comp . This is used to label those folders in the DC tree that actually represent a DC.
You must store all development objects and files that belong to a particular DC in folders underneath of _comp .
The following figure shows an exemplary file structure below the _comp folder. The src folder contains all development objects of the DC. The DC defines two packages com.sap.X and com.sap.Y with several files. There are also two package-free files a and b . The file with the reserved name .dcdef contains the DC description.
Component Definition
Every component (DC) is defined by a set of files, stored and versioned together with the DC.
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A file with the reserved name .dcdef stores the basic attributes such as name, description and component type, the parent DC (if there is one), a list of child DC (if there are any), a list of dependencies, links to the DC sources, and the access control list (ACL). The .dcdef file must be stored directly in the _comp folder.
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The folder _comp/def contains one file for each public part of the DC, which carries the name of the public part with the extension .pp . This file contains a list of the development objects belonging to the public part and an ACL for this public part.
Both .dcdef and .pp files are stored in an XML-based format.
Direct manipulations of these files can make a DC unusable.