XD 17 was released this week and includes a set of significant changes related to selection and edit contexts:
- Users can now select multiple items that are in different containers at the same time. Do not assume all selected items have the same parent node. (It was already not safe to assume this, due to selections spanning Artboards, but plugins making this mistake will misbehave more often now).
- XD 17 loosens the “edit context” rules that limit which nodes your plugin can edit or select. Previously, plugins could generally edit just the selected nodes and all their siblings. Now, plugins can edit many (but still not all!) of the nodes in the subtree containing the selected nodes. See the updated edit context documentation for details and examples.
- Plugins still cannot edit globally across the entire document at once, even though in very simple testing it may appear that this works. Non-Group containers still limit the scope of the edit context.
For further details on these API changes, see the updated changelog page or this complete diff of all docs changes.
Also, a reminder that the process for publishing to the XD plugin listing has changed a bit as of last week. See our earlier forum post on AdobeIO Console changes.
Note: If you build a plugin that uses these new API capabilities, consider whether it’s possible to gracefully degrade to support older versions of XD (and please test in an older XD version to confirm it works!). But if your plugin absolutely requires XD 17, don’t forget to set your
manifest.jsonfile to specify"minVersion": "17.0".
There’s also one enhancement added in XD 17 for plugin users:
- Update notifications when any installed plugins have a newer version available in the plugins listing.
To see what else is new for XD users, check out our general XD 17 release announcement.
