Components

Components represent a collection of versioned artifacts within a project area. For example, instead of working with all the artifacts from the project in one stream (for example, that represents a physical piece called a Handheld Meter Reader), you can use a component to represent a smaller collection of artifacts (for example, to represent a smaller physical piece such as a Sensor in the handheld meter reader).

You can split a project into multiple pieces called components. Each component is like a building block that represents a physical or logical part of your project. Components make it easier to reuse and work with parts of a project. After you plan and create components, organize project artifacts into them based on your project needs, instead of working with all the artifacts in one collection (configuration).

Before version 6.0.3, the project area was the first-level container for artifacts. You couldn’t split a project into smaller pieces. Each configuration (stream or baseline) in the project contained one version of each artifact in the project. If you wanted smaller collections of project artifacts, you had to create projects to correspond with each grouping, which had much administrative overhead.

For each IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management application, carefully plan which components to create, to ensure flexibility in assembling products and their variants. If you don’t plan, you will encounter problems when you assemble the components into global configuration hierarchies that represent products and their variants.