I would love that one component interaction can impact another component
Example : i’m working for a video communication tool. I would like that when i mute microphone, it changes variant of the stream to indicate that microphone is muted
I have two components : Stream and ToggleMicrophone. If i have microphone in state muted i would like that stream has muted indicator state
Note: The Change to action can only be used on variants in a component set. It’s not possible to use this action between two separate components or top-level frames.
It would be possible if both components were part of one variant this is not the case.
I want to be able to change state of the stream when i click on the mic toggle button
I would like that to be able to change variant state from another component.
If i click on a button i can switch another component variant from A to B.
That would be really useful. The ideal would be to simply allow interactions between pages, independent of it being a component or not. The only difference is that components propagate their interactions to their instances.
Allowing to change the state of another component, which is essential, would not be enough, the components would need to be implemented in the same file and in the same page, which defeats the purpose of pages in the first place. It is sad that every neat feature Figma has for organize and keep your design system neat is lost when prototyping.
The workaround I am using to simulate non-local interactions, is to implement container components, that combine the change of state in multiple child components. It has some drawbacks that are not obvious at first, but may be enough for what you are trying to achieve right now.
Change to shouldn’t assume “THIS” component. There should be one extra field which asks “which component”. Specifically, it is going to be the component that opened up the menu. The modal.
This would enable much more dynamic prototypes to be built quicker. I struggle with this constantly, especially in building navigation. I have a nav that expands/collapses and since each frame of a prototype is effectively it’s own state of the application, I have to create 2x the number of screens to account for if the user has the nav element expanded or collapsed.
Instead, I want to build a navigation “controller” and a page “viewer” that are separate where the nav can control the view and they have independent states/behaviors.
I am also dealing with this limitation. I thought Figma offered this possibility because it’s…basic for prototyping and time-saving.
I may be wrong but I’m creating a page with a component that has 4 variants, each one is composed of 4 tabs (each one with 3 states) and the 4 correspondent contents. I thought I could control the main component state by assigning a specific action to each tab button… but no, I really have to repeat the same whole page 4 times to simulate this simple interaction.
Control components using other components is crucial, nested or not, on the same page or not.
We need this feature ASAP. Here is another scenario:
I have this form which is asking the user to choose from the checkbox options. Before anything is selected, the “Continue” button is in an inactive state.
I want to turn the state of this button into active when at least one value is selected from the checkboxes.
It is not possible to achieve this with the current limitation we have in Figma. It would be a really helpful feature to have.
Agree, very useful and can help with building powerful design systems. But my idea is to create somekind of global variables table for the design file and allow component variants & properties depend on this variables and to change them. This will also require “combo” interaction when you press the button, then have a delay and then show true/false validation in input and a snackbar appears in the bottom of the screen i.e.
This feature would be great, I imagine it’s pretty difficult to implement - but I believe that with this you can prototype anything you can imagine. Certainly so if there was some register/state store which components can write to and read from for the purpose of rendering/transitions.
In Sketch, you could build a plugin which does this because there are plugins there which run in real time. In Figma, we can’t even build a plugin to do this because Figma plugins don’t run in real time.
Might be a huge feature depending on how Figma works in the backend.
This will be a game-changing feature to Figma … something that can instantly bump its already skyrocketing popularity. Prototyping complex interaction would be a breeze with this functionality @Figma_Support please please add it to your list
This!
What about a sub-component that could influence the parent parameters?
I have an example. I have the choice of using a sub component called bgd-inverter when showed it does a negative of the background of the (parent) component.
Great visually, super great component-wise since I could handle Dark Mode versions with a sub-component switch instead of having Variants… BUT, No way to interact with other components (i.e. switching a logo variant in another component on the page to Dark Mode or Changing the Parent Layer from light to Dark).