I’m exploring the use of symbols in Builder.io and was wondering if there’s a way to use them with references in a more flexible way.
Specifically, I’d like to insert the same symbol on multiple pages, but when I update the symbol on one page, I want the ability to either accept or reject those changes on other pages where the symbol is used.
Right now, from what I understand, symbols update globally when modified, but I’m looking for a way to make changes more controlled—so that I can decide whether to apply updates on each instance of the symbol separately.
Is there a built-in way to achieve this in Builder.io? Or would this require a custom implementation?
Hi @mateuszad Thanks for reaching out and for this question!
Currently this is not explicitly supported with Symbols, but there are ways you could achieve something similar.
The flow I would recommend is anytime you want to implement a version change of a symbol is instead create a duplicate of the symbol
So MySymbol → My Symbol v2
From there you can search your content for instances where MySymbol exists… luckily this is possible to do by querying the meta object on a content JSON meta.symbolsUsed, so you could fetch page models using a specific symbol with id of 12345 by querying
then go into those entries that get returned, update the symbol to MySymbol v2 and then go from there.
It is a bit manual currently, but should achieve what you want! If you think there could be a better workflow, I would recommend raising a feature request at https://ideas.builder.io/ to share with our product team!