Here is a schematic representation of the window-oriented view hierarchy, with the corresponding classes also shown.

The terms “parent” and “child” designate the relationship between pairs of views, taking into account which one contains the other. In the figure, the top-level view is the parent of both the tools and the scroll views, and the latter is the parent of the working view. Inversely, the scroll view is a child of the top-level view, and so on.

C++ classes and subclasses also represent parent-child relationships. Note that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the window-oriented versus class-oriented view hierarchies. The C++ class hierarchy is a different way of looking at how a view is constructed. For the complete class-oriented diagram, see the Class-Oriented View Hierarchy.