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Antoine
Active Member
October 20, 2022

Nested property hidden with multiple selection

  • October 20, 2022
  • 104 replies
  • 5488 views

Been playing around with the “expose nested properties” feature currently in beta.
One of the great uses of variant properties is the ability to batch edit property values on multiple selected components. That use doesn’t carry over to exposed nested properties (yet I hope).

Demo file to help

When selecting one component instance exposing nested properties, said properties display fine. Add another instance of the same component to your selection (using Shift+Click), and the nested properties outright disappear from the right panel.

I haven’t seen this issue raised elsewhere! Do you experience it too?

104 replies

Jonathan_Schmitz1
March 29, 2023

This feature is now out of beta, and this has still not been fixed. This makes all the work that the Figma team put into it pretty useless 😦 (for my purposes at least).

Matt.Guzy
March 31, 2023

This really is a must. I have been underwhelmed with the number of use cases Nested instances helps with

April 10, 2023

+1 this is such an important fix for making nested properties actually useful

Jonas_Techen1
April 17, 2023

This would make the ‘nested component’-feature way more powerful and a hugh time saver. Please Figma 🙌

nasgary
April 19, 2023

It looks like only the options for the final component show up when multiple instances are selected.
When multiple instances are selected, the user can press Enter until the properties for each nested component shows up, but its not a good work-flow.

Raphael_Loder
New Participant
April 27, 2023

+1 here. It makes batch editing a nightmare.

Dusty
New Member
May 26, 2023

Yet another feature that just works as expected in Sketch. This gap makes for extremely slow work when editing data tables, long lists, etc. — and has made it onto my list of considerations for clients weighing software options.

This feature, along with being able to specify which nested fields are editable at the parent level (Expose nested instances -> at property level, also default behavior in Sketch), would significantly improve the experience of designing within your app, Figma.

June 1, 2023

+1 It would improve the usability of the design experience when altering multiple instances of components with nested properties.

The alternative isn’t very user friendly — I either:

  1. Edit each components nested properties individually
  2. Delete most of my components except for 1, modify the properties, duplicate the component, and re-apply any unique aspects such as data being used for text properties or image fills.
Dusan_Zivanovic
June 5, 2023

This would be a great improvement. I’m creating tables and need to select the component inside separately…

Paul_Lyons
New Participant
July 12, 2023

I agree this is a very frustrating and should be added natively.

There is however in the meantime a plugin called ‘Selection variants’ which automatically deep dives into all variants within a component and any components nested inside of it.

Figma

Its not ideal as it exposes everything, not just the properties you define at the top level, which means you have to look a bit harder within the plug-in window for the nested property you want to update.

It does work though and is better than manually updating one at a time.