A view row must be a type or an element. A view row cannot be an attribute.

Every view must have a view row, which must be an element or complex type.

The view root is the top-level element in a view. The view root is the parent to all the other elements in the view.

The view row can be the same as the view root unless the view is denormalized.

Two views can have the same view row in an XML source or XML Parser transformation.

The view row element must be the lowest multiple-occurring element in the view. A view cannot contain many-to-many relationships.

If you add a multiple-occurring element to a view with no other multiple-occurring element, you change the view row to the new element by default. If the view already has a multiple-occurring element, you cannot add another multiple-occurring element.

You do not need to specify a view row when you create an empty view. However, as soon as you add a column to the view, the Designer creates the view row. This is true even if you add just the primary key.

You can change a view row at a later time, but you cannot change a view root unless there are no schema components in the view.

You can specify a view row that consists of a pivoted element, such as:

An effective view row for a view is the path of view rows from the top of a hierarchy relationship down to the view row in the view. A view can have multiple effective view rows because the view can have multiple hierarchy relationships in the XML definition.