<aside> 🔗 Medium Link: https://chinguyenthuy.medium.com/sketch-how-to-make-scalable-symbol-3-tooltip-ab45bb839d24

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Are you having this problem when you’re working with your dropdown menu symbol?

• You only want to show 4 items only, but the symbol is created with 6 items. In order to do it, detaching it from the symbol is the only solution.

Detaching from the symbol to have the desired number of options for the dropdown menu

• Or if you want to have hover or selected state in the design, you need to insert it manually or even end up detaching it from the symbol to change the style 🤦‍♀️

Detaching from symbol to change background colour state

If you’re having this problem, this article may help you to create a flexible and scalability dropdown.

Do you want your symbol will work like this?

• Hide/ Show options easily without detaching from the symbol

• Change states to hover/ selected/ disabled easily without detaching from a symbol

Let me show you how by utilizing Nested Symbol and Smart Layout 😉

First, let's take a look at all the elements needed to create a dropdown menu:

Dropdown Menu anatomy

A drop-down menu is combined with a list of options, each option is formed by a label and bounding box and the background. What you should do is turn all the elements into the symbol inside a dropdown menu. Here we go 💫

How to make a Dropdown Menu symbol

1. Make a symbol for the Option’s Background

▸ Step 1: Create Style for the dropdown field and the background of the option inside the dropdown menu with different states accordingly

▸ Step 2: Create all the option backgrounds with different states that applied the style accordingly for default, hover, and selected.