I am trying to write an XD plugin that dynamically populates an artboard with components, but I don't see any mention of components in the XD plugin API. Is it possible to look through the file and find available components and place them on stage? Better yet, maybe even pull a component from a specific file in the cloud?
Unfortunately, it isn't possible to create symbol instances (that's what components are called in the APIs), yet. Here is the explaining quote from the plugin docs:
It is not currently possible for plugins to create a new component definition or a new
SymbolInstancenode, aside from usingcommands.duplicateto clone existingSymbolInstances.
(https://adobexdplatform.com/plugin-docs/reference/scenegraph.html#symbolinstance)
There is a feature request open for it in the official plugin developer forums which you can vote for. According to Steve Kwak (Adobe), however, this seems to be problematic due to the edit context, meaning it may still take a while until we get API access to that.
There, unfortunately, also, as of yet, isn't any way to list the available symbols for a document. For the other asset types, this is possible via the assets module (cf. https://adobexdplatform.com/plugin-docs/reference/assets.html), but not (yet) for symbols.
I hope this helps (although it's probably not the answer you've hoped for).