How to handle plugin data change by another user? (private data stored by setPluginData)

Hey Maxim! Welcome!

1. you’ll want to setPluginData on figma nodes in the file. there is no plugin node. depending on what you are doing, that might be something like a relevant frame node. folks often store “general” information on the file root (figma.root). you can access this with getPluginData
2. you can detect this PROPERTY_CHANGE with that snippet and change.properties.includes("pluginData")

together, you could do something like this…

setting data

figma.root.setPluginData("maxim", "wow!");

detecting the change

figma.on("documentchange", (event) => {
  const rootPluginDataChange = event.documentChanges.find((change) =>
    change.node.id === figma.root.id && 
    change.type === "PROPERTY_CHANGE" &&
    change.properties.includes("pluginData")
  )
  if (rootPluginDataChange) {
    const pluginDataValue = figma.root.getPluginData("maxim");
    respondToChange(pluginDataValue);
  }
})

Hello, Jake!
I modeled a case with two users, and it works!
Thank you very much for the detailed answer!

It’s probably worth mentioning that there is no way to detect which pluginData value specifically has changed without keeping track locally.

For example,

figma.root.setPluginData("maxim", "wow!");
figma.root.setPluginData("jake", "wow!");

would both be documentchange events on pluginData

if you were only interested in responding "maxim" changes, you will have to check the “maxim” value locally and see that the value different than the last time you checked.

using the code in my last post, the “respondToChange” handler would look something like this…

let lastMaximValue;

function  respondToChange(pluginDataValue) {
  if (pluginDataValue !== lastMaximValue) {
    lastMaximValue = pluginDataValue;
    console.log("ok the value we are watching actually changed!");
  }
}