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).
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?
Ever since the properties have ben added to components, it has been a great improvement in my workflow. Especially the fact that I can select multiple instances and change a propery for all of them in just one go. Hallelujah!
However when I’m using the “expose properties from nested instances”, the nested properties are shown when selecting 1 instances, but when I select multiple, they disappear.
I share you pain. This forced me to stay away from nested instances in situations where I need to do edit multiple instances at the same time.
I came up with a workround for this that isn’t the cleanest, but it works. Instead of using nested instances, you can use the instance swap property. Instead of creating variant in your components, create a separate component of each variant and when you create the instance swap property in your main component, you can select the “variants” as preferred values in the instance swap property. When you select multiple instances of your component they will all display their properties and you can edit all at once.
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).
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.
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.
+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:
Edit each components nested properties individually
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.
(for my purposes at least).