Introduction to visual elements and the visual tree

The most basic building block in UI(User Interface) Allows a user to interact with your application. Unity currently supports three UI systems. More info
See in Glossary Toolkit is a visual elementA node of a visual tree that instantiates or derives from the C# VisualElement class. You can style the look, define the behaviour, and display it on screen as part of the UI. More info
See in Glossary. The visual elements are ordered into a hierarchy tree with parent-child relationships. This is called the visual treeAn object graph, made of lightweight nodes, that holds all the elements in a window or panel. It defines every UI you build with the UI Toolkit.
See in Glossary.

The diagram below displays a simplified example of the visual tree, and the rendered result in UI Toolkit.

The VisualElement class is the base for all nodes in the visual tree. The VisualElement base class contains properties such as styles, layout data, and event handlers. Visual elements can have children and descendant visual elements. For example, in the diagram above, the first Box visual element has three child visual elements: Label, Checkbox, and Slider.

You can customize the appearance of visual elements through inline styles and stylesheets. You can also use event callbacks to modify the behavior of a visual element.

VisualElement derives into subclasses that define additional behavior and functionality, such as controls. UI Toolkit includes a variety of built-in controls with specialized behavior. For example, the following items are available as built-in controls:

• Buttons
• TogglesA checkbox that allows the user to switch an option on or off. More info
  See in Glossary
• Text input fieldsA field that allows the user to input a Text string More info
  See in Glossary

You can also combine visual elements together and modify their behavior to create custom controls.

Additional resources

• UXML element VisualElement
• Control reference