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Does anybody know what determines whether or not Dev Mode annotations show up in instances of a component?


We maintain a design system that supplies many dozens of applications, so our components come with a large variety of features, not all of which are relevant to every product. We use Dev Mode annotations primarily for hand-off to our design system devs, so the annotations are relevant for the main component set, but will confuse a product-side dev.


Vice versa, sometimes we do want an annotation to show up in every instance of a component, but it doesn’t. If this is an option that can be toggled, I haven’t found it.


as of my testing and the current Figma API:



  • annotations made in the main component / variants will not be visible in instances

  • instances have no annotations carried, buy you can add another set of annotations on each instance or any frame within the instance.


in order to see annotations in the main component you have to actually navigate to it as a developer.


We had no work-around over this and it seems to be linked to the way the objects are handled in the Figma backend.


A plugin that would accomplish this may not be that hard to do, but it would not keep them in sync.

Then I suppose what I’m dealing with is a Figma bug, rather than a weird feature. There are several components in our system that will display Dev Mode annotations in every single instance. This seems to occur particularly when the annotation is connected to a variant that isn’t the default.

screen-capture-ezgif.com-resize

oh… i think we need divine intervention from Figma team in this thread 😃


My feeling is that the annotations API is not yet figured out an we may encounter different behaviours on different iterations we had behind the scenes.


I made a new test now and my results are same as before. attached.

Screenshot 2024-10-12 at 11.48.59


My best bet is that you have a per component off-standard behaviour. Maybe it will not be like that for new components.


Important

NOTE: I am not a Figma engineer. I just spent a lot of time working with the API. Annotations is one that i am particularly interested in 🙂

Great thread, and pertinent to my current challenge. Figma, please allow for more options with Annotations carrying thru from Component to Instances! Having to set the instances each time per screen is a waste of time and opportunity to improve this feature…

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