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 Development Components (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 DC that is not enclosed in any other component is called a top-level DC. The figure below shows the inner structure of a development component.
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 lose its enclosing component. In the following figure, an inner component is removed from a stack of nested components:
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.
Changing an enclosure relation is not supported in the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio.