Repositories, Folders, and Items

See Also Tasks

The explorer pane displays a hierarchical folder view of the Visual Component Manager's organization. This organization contains three kinds of elements:

• The top-level folders in this view are repository databases.
  
  
• Each database contains sub-folders .
  
  
• Each sub-folder can contain other folders and/or items.

Repositories

Visual Component Manager uses the Microsoft Repository to store and retrieve components. It can create and access two separate kinds of repository databases: Access (.mdb) for local repositories and SQL Server for shared (team) repositories. When Visual Component Manager is first installed, it creates an Access database on your local machine.

You can create or open additional repository databases of either type, using the Repository command in the context menu.

Folders

Visual Component Manager organizes the components it contains into folders. Each folder can contain both items (components) and sub-folders. There are folders for each supported item type in the local repository database, and you can create additional folders by clicking New Folder on the context menu.

Items

Individual components are the lowest-level items stored in the repository database. In order to know how to load, reference, and otherwise manage the components it stores, Visual Component Manager categorizes each item by type. The item type determines the behind-the-scenes ôhandlerö used by Visual Component Manager to perform various operations on the component item.

The types of items currently supported by Visual Component Manager include:

For More Information   For more information about the operations you can perform on repository databases, folders, and items, see Visual Component Manager Common Tasks. For a listing and description of Visual Component Manager commands, see Visual Component Manager User Interface Reference.