Editing a background image from an unlinked symbol still updates the symbol

Design help General
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Hey there!

Loving webflow but just encountered an annoying bug. I found that the “unlink from symbol” functionality isn’t working for background images. I’m able to unlink a symbol instance from the symbol and update the text just fine, but upon editing the unlinked symbol to change the background image, it still updates the other instances of the symbol.

EDIT: As I work with unlinked symbols more, I also just found that editing the width/margin/padding, etc. of a div is also updating all symbol instances as well as unlinked symbol instances the use the same reference symbol.

Let me know if there is anything I can do here to help!

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Ah actually see what is happening that may be somewhat counter-intuitive. Removing the symbol reference still keeps the same style setting, so editing values of the style appears to edit the symbol, when in fact it’s editing the style that I assume is agnostic to the symbol. It seemed like they were one in the same, but symbols are related just to content then?

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Symbols are just groups of content. Styles within a symbol are not specific to that instance of the symbol.

What it appears you’re looking to achieve can be accomplished with collections. That comes with its own pitfalls, though (namely, hosting).

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Hey @kkukshtel!

Thanks for your message and welcome to the forums! :slight_smile: Notice that the div with background image has a class applied to it. If you edit the other instances of a symbol by double-clicking it, select the same div in a symbol and see how it has the same class applied. So what’s happening, is that when you change a style of a node outside of a symbol, you’re still changing a style that is applied on a class. And that class is applied on other elements like your symbol inner nodes.

Now… When you unlink a symbol, you can click on the arrow over the class in Selector on the Style Panel and choose Duplicate Class. That way you’ll create a new class with all styles that were on an original one, but you will not affect those in a symbol.

Let me know if that helps :slight_smile:
Cheers,
Bart

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Hey Bart!

Thanks for getting back (and thanks for the welcoming)! This is a great explanation - coming from a Unity background I was assuming that breaking an instance broke the other references as well, but as you and @Cricitem pointed out, I was still using the same style so everything was persisting outside of the content. I’ve opted to use combo classes, as it seem more intuitive and gets at an idea of inheritance. Thank you both so much for helping!

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