By Dani Beaumont
The real power with nested components comes when you start to swap out the components in your design. In this step let's use a Repeat Grid to duplicate a set of nested components, and then vary the icon on each of them.
Here in step 04 notice I've got two artboards — Plant Card Tiles, and Add Plant Card. I want to come in and look at a detailed view of the Plant Card Tiles, so I'm just going to move that more into view here, and I'll click on it. With the tile selected I can see here in the Layers panel that it consists of a nested component on the left-hand side, a text label, and then there's an icon there towards the right-hand side. Behind that I have a canvas or a fill color. I'll come in and select the overall group and convert it to a component. So right click here and just make it a component. With that set I'm going to come here to the Properties Inspector and click on the Repeat Grid toggle once I've done that I can press and drag multiple tiles here on the canvas and adjust the space between them if I'd like to. When I click off I'm now ready to come in and vary the icon here on the right-hand side. To do that I'm going to come here into the Assets panel.
From here I'll scroll down to where I can see some of the individual icons that I want to work with. I'll come here now to this Repeat Grid and just click inside of it until I get to that nested component layer there. I can take a look at what I've done by going back to the Layers panel and make sure that I have that closed box selected at the correct level from there in the Assets panel. I'll come in and choose a different icon; let's say the water icon. I'm just going to press and drag it right over that first until I see the icon change. I'll grab another icon and press and drag to replace it. And we'll just do this a few more times. And once again the beauty here is if I decide after the fact I want to change some aspect of that parent component, like move the text objects here a bit higher, although I've made changes to the text on each of the tiles, any of the nested components remain changed and are not overridden.
Okay, with components pretty well covered, let's switch over to another way of quickly varying content, and that's by way of component states.
Sometimes you need to switch out which component is being used in a certain situation. Adobe XD makes it easy to swap components with a drag and drop interaction. With the Assets panel open, all Adobe XD components will be visible in the panel, and can be dragged onto other components on the XD canvas. When the blue highlight appears, drop the component to replace it. This behavior is called drag to replace, and it's a great way of working with Adobe XD components when designing rapidly.
