Preview Primary Viewer Without Switching Active Comp in timeline

[Zamboni4231]

Hello friends,

I have two comp viewers side by side. The first, which is locked and displays the outermost composition in my project, is set to "Always Preview this View." The second viewer is unlocked, and I use it to display children of the outermost comp so I can edit them, and then see the result in the first viewer.

What I want

To enable "Always Preview this View" on the parent so that I can make adjustments to a child without constantly switching between the comp I'm editing and the final result to preview those changes.

What's Happening Instead

 When I press the spacebar to preview, the active comp in the timeline switches from the one I'm editing to the one I'm previewing.

Is there any way to accomplish what I'm trying to do? Clicking back and forth over and over is maddening and feels entirely unnecessary. Thanks in advance.

[Mylenium]

This is not possible as just explained a few posts down in relation to expressions. There is no exclusive relation between parent comps and the sub-comps they contain, hence there is no implicit method to derive these relations in expressions and otherwise, given that nested comps can be inserted in any order at any level, including being themselves part of other pre-comps that bear no connection to your main parent comp. See the problem? Once you move beyond the most simple scenario, there's no way to determine the upstream realtionships and it all becomes a mess of cyclic connections or infinitely branching ones. Indeed the downstream processing as employed in the render timeline is the only way to handle this correctly.

Mylenium