Dropdowns prototyping frustrations and suggestions

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Situation - need for a clickable dropdown menu within a dialogue window which is an overlay itself built with auto layout.

------------- Possible solutions and why they didn’t work ------------- :

  1. overlay - but the dialogue window is an overlay of its own and swap overlay on click swaps the dropdown overlay instead of ‘parental’ overlay.

  2. button variant with a dropdown menu out of the component frame so it doesn’t affect the auto layout - nope, the reversed order of layers in auto-layout makes the object closer to the top edge of the page physically below those that closer to the bottom one, so if there are elements below the button in the layout, the dropdown is displayed beneath them. Here is this particular issue described separately- Z-index property that is independent from Auto Layout - #11 by Roger_Junior

  3. as a workaround I tried a variant with a ‘Drop up’ - menu going upwards instead of down and here I figured out - the elements out of a variant frame aren’t clickable - Argh…

  4. What worked. I found a way around with dropdown transitioning to a separate instance of a screen background calling for the required dialogue window overlay via ‘After 1 ms delay’. It’s blinking, but it’s working… but it feels like unnecessary acrobatics.

----------- Suggested improvements ------------

  1. An image option for the prototype background? It would save so much space and fuss when you have a ton of dialogue windows with interactive elements over them. Currently, only a colour change option is available for this.
  1. Overlays grouping/hierarchy settings? If 2 overlays interact make an option to assign a parental overlay?
  1. Make elements out of frame but belonging to the frame optionally clickable?

Thank you.

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The easiest solution is to flip the overlay and then flip the contents to reverse the mirroring (shift + v in your case). Now you need to put the items in the correct order, but there’s a plugin called “Reverse layer order” which makes it a one click operation, and now your dropdown should be on top in the layer stack and display above the inputs.

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Hey @Daria8, I think you’re facing a problem very similar to mine and I thought that having a way of changing the z-index would fix that.

I would suggest you to vote on this feature request to make the Figma team aware of this problem: Feature request: Z-index property that is independent from autolayout - #11 by Roger_Junior

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Thank you for that, that will be handy! But in this particular case, it’s just an additional annoyance, they are still not clickable and that’s the dealbreaker with this option usage.

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Thanks, I’ll vote. The problem is larger than this though, in this particular case it’s just an additional annoyance, they are still not clickable and that’s the dealbreaker with this option usage. The problem is not being able to have a clickable dropdown in a dialogue window.

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