Nested property hidden with multiple selection

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?

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Just discovered this issue too! Hope it fill be fixed as it doesn’t make sense to manually edit each instance because of this.

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I’d love to see this added as well. Definitely a gap in the feature.

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+1. I have the same issue/request.

+1 Loving the nested properties, but this is a major pain at the moment

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Just discovered this doesn’t work today. Makes it almost not worth the feature if this isn’t fixed. But will be a huge time saver if it is.

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+1 this needs to be fixed to make this feature more useful

+1, would be a real time & pain saver

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.

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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 :frowning: (for my purposes at least).

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

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

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

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+1 here. It makes batch editing a nightmare.

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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.

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+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.

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.

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.

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+1, it makes no sense that when multi-selecting components with exposed properties that you’d somehow be unable to edit the properties of nested components. It defeats the the purpose of exposing properties of nested components if you can’t edit them when selecting more than one.

Like others have stated, updating properties for a group of components becomes a nightmare. Way too tedious to do this component by component.

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+1 this issue defies the purpose of the feature

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+1 Same struggle here!

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