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How can I repoint all instances in a file (whose ‘parent’ component is outside the current file) to components in the current file?


The particular context is:



  • I have been working on a single file ‘A’ and have not used any design libraries (ie all the components are in A)

  • I duplicated file A - the original - to work on a section of it. In hindsight this was dumb and the start of the problem. Say the duplicate is file B. Because B is a duplicate of A, it contains all the components from A

  • Worked on a lot of frames in B. Made no changes to the components in B

  • Copied the changed frames from B to A… to discover my error cos every instance that was copied over refers to a component in file B. And this is bad… I want all instances in file A to point to the components in file A (and now file A has instances that point in different ‘directions’)


In hindsight I should have created a library from file A and linked any other temporary working file to that library… but i didnt 😢 - such is the lot of a newbie.


Have been unable to think my way to a solution here that does not involve brute force on every single instance I copied from A to B. A very disheartening prospect given the number of frames & instances.


Any suggestions?

tx

Conrad

You need to publish both, this way you will be able to swap libraries. Publish both, move designs from B back to A. Then swap components from B to A


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Pavel

Tx. So to confirm:



  1. Publish library from A to say LibA

  2. Publish library from B to say LibB

  3. Copy frames from B back to A

  4. Then… in A, force a swap of the libraries so all components in A refer to LibA.


Is that correct?

tx

About right, yes

I use the InstaRelinker plugin for this all the time, works perfectly:


Figma

Pavel / Daniel

Thx for the help. Both work. InstaRelinker is brilliant.

cheers

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