Skip to main content
Viacheslav_Poliakov1
New Member
June 26, 2023

Assign variables to variant properties of the main components & nested instances

  • June 26, 2023
  • 51 replies
  • 13908 views

I haven’t found this in “coming soon” for variables…

As it works now, a variable can control properties only of the topmost component instance. You have to assign a variable again and again to each instance each time you place it, you can not nest components with variables at all.

51 replies

Phil_Larsen
Active Member
September 12, 2023

Running into this issue trying to assign a boolean variable to a boolean property in a nested component. In order to achieve this, I need to break the component link which breaks the whole point of having things built in a component.

Ioana_Ionescu
New Participant
September 28, 2023

I might be talking nonsense - or this might already be possible 🤔, but hear me out.

What if we could set a variable to a component property? 😬

I was working with a dropdown and thought this could be useful since I have a main component for the dropdown and I want to use it in multiple instances with different text and different placeholders.

Just a thought 💭

Terry_Burris
September 29, 2023

I would agree with this as well; something I just ran into myself. I started looking into nested components and updating the properties in the nested components, but that doesn’t seem to be a win as a workaround for this topic since those can only be updated via the instance selected, and you can’t attach variables to those properties created either (which I think could be a good supplement to the variables feature). Would love for this to get fixed since nesting components is widely used, especially for any dropdown, navbar, or menu!

Jonathan_Summers-Muir
October 14, 2023

Also running into the nested component issue with variables.

It feels like one of the major hurdles that needs resolving to fully adopt a variable workflow.

I would say this is more important than any other variables issue right now. Anyone building a design system will have used nested components and will have hit this issue after building out all their design system components, only to find they can’t set variables to nested components, frequently used in Dropdowns, Overlays/Popovers, Lists, Menus etc

very much looking forward to getting support for this.

edit - workaround right now is to just not make a collection of Components into a Component, but just keep them in a frame and copy and paste it. Feels a bit wrong and updating it would mean replacing all of the instances of that duplicated Frame if you need to make changes. Workaround is basically more manual work 😃

Jaron_Lugtenburg
October 31, 2023

In need of this feature asap, without the ability of setting variables to nested instances I still get cluttered screens because of having to duplicating everything unnecessarily and the workflow is really awful that way. Same with an option to switch variable modes through prototype to make it interactive without workarounds.

November 8, 2023
    1. As a user I want to be able to assign variable values to nested components so that I can significantly reduce the number of instances of a complex component.
November 13, 2023

Yup, I really need this as well. Seems counter-intuitive that I’d have to detach an instance to assign variables to the nested instances…

Martin_Funk
December 13, 2023

+1 from my side.

January 18, 2024

+1 from my side as well, I would love to have this feature asap 😉

deletedlc
January 18, 2024

Cannot tell you how much this, or the lack of, frustrates me. We are like THIS close to tell the component instances to switch to the right variant depending on variant modes!!!