The UI elements of a view are maintained in a hierarchical structure. The hierarchy is based on aggregations like the parent/child relationship between the UI element container and the UI element or the relationship between a TabStrip UI element and its Tab subelements. Beside CONTEXT_MENUS, the top element in this hierarchy is a UI element container (ROOTUIELEMENTCONTAINER), which is added to a view. The parent-child relationship between UI element container and UI element provides a general mechanism for the hierarchy structure of a view. In a UI element container, any UI elements and additional UI element containers can be nested.

There are special UI elements like the TabStrip UI element. They can be considered containers, but unlike a UI element container can only contain certain subelements. A TabStrip UI element, for example, can only contain Tab subelements. Each Tab subelement can contain a title (Caption UI element), a toolbar and additional UI elements to display a content.

By default, the entries for CONTEXT_MENUS and ROOTUIELEMENTCONTAINERare available for each view in the View Designer.

You can use the following UI elements as the root element of a view using the Switch Root Element function in the context menu:

The SilverlightIsland and FlashIsland UI elements are for the development of self-defined UI elements. You can use SilverlightIsland and FlashIsland to integrate your own components from different technologies into Web Dynpro ABAP.