Use the Components view to create components and associate properties and data elements with them. Components are a grouping of similar application data—items such as files, shortcuts, and registry entries—organized from the developer's perspective. Your users will never see components during the installation; the data will be set up on their systems depending on which features are selected for installation.

Use the Components view to create the components that will comprise your merge module. Components are a grouping of similar application data—items such as files, shortcuts, and registry entries—organized from the developer's perspective.

## Adding Components

Components allow you to organize your application data into similar groups. Unlike features they constitute the developer's view of a project—items such as files, shortcuts, and registry entries. Components are associated with features, and a component may belong to more than one feature.

There are three ways to create a component in this view:

- Right-click on the topmost item and select New Component.

- Right-click on the topmost item and select Component Wizard to launch the wizard and let InstallShield organize your files into components according to Setup Best Practices.

- Launch the Component wizard, select a predefined component type, and define the component yourself.

A component name must contain only letters, digits, underscores (_), and periods (.), and must begin with a letter or an underscore.

not contain any of the following characters:

\ / : * ? " ' < > |

not contain any of the following characters:

\ / : * ? " ' < > |

If you run the Component Wizard from the context menu in the Components view and no feature is associated with a component, then the following message will appear:
In order for a component to be installed, it must be associated with a feature. At this time, the Component Wizard can associate the new component with a new feature. Or, you may associate the component with a feature in your project at a later time through the 'Setup Design' view; Do you wish to create a new feature at this time?"
If you click Cancel, the Component Wizard will not run. Otherwise, the wizard will run. If you click No, then the component will not be associated with a feature. If you click Yes, you will see a new feature dialog where you will be able to create a new feature. You will be asked to enter a name for the new feature. The Component Wizard will then associate the new component with this feature.

Components that are not associated with a feature are displayed with the orphaned component icon .

### Adding Component Subfolders

You can create subfolders for a component from the context menu when you right-click on either Dynamic File Links or Static File Links. The folder will then appear in the appropriate files list.

Static files will be represented by the following icon.

Dynamic files will be represented by the following icon.

## The Components View vs. the Setup Design View

Although the Components view appears to be an exact subset of the Setup Design view and, in fact, you can create and modify components in precisely the same way in both views, there is one major difference between them. The Setup Design view is different because it allows you to associate components with features. Component/Feature relationships can also be defined in the Files and Folders view.