I’ve come across this bug report, as I was looking to report one myself because I had the same issue. It seems rather odd that it is “By Design” that child blueprints cannot be selected in the world outliner. I’m wondering what the reasoning behind this was.
I thought about the possibility that it is because perhaps for some reason you wouldn’t want to be able to modify the properties of these children, but then why not provide a read-only overview of the actor? The absence of this feature makes debugging actors with child actors very difficult.
Furthermore, I actually found a second and contradictory post by a UE4 staff member here, who refers to an issue that has been “fixed”, except the behaviour is still present in UE4 version 4.22.
I am not sure why you can’t do select child actors from the world outliner. I just tried it myself and it doesn’t seem to work. You can, however, as an alternative, double-click the parent actor in the world outliner to focus on it and then, in the viewport, double-click the child actor to select it. That will work too.
As for double-clicking the actor in the world outliner, I am not sure when or if they will fix that for real.
That’s actually not how that exploit works in my experience. If you select a child actor, it will always fall back on the parent of that child actor. So when there are multiple child actors in a hierarchy, you can get all but the last that way.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you try to select the child actor from the world outliner. It won’t work that way as it will fall back on the parent. If you double-click the child actor from inside the viewport itself instead, you can select it that way.
You can search the actor you want, but the parent still shows up in the list so if you have multiple actors and want to mass select a parented object you have to select the actor too. So how do you do it?!
I have this same issue, selecting an instance actor which is a child of a packed level or a merged actor doesn’t highlight in the world outliner, therefore, when I have a lot of actors in the scene, it is a hassle to find it’s parent in the world oultline to be able to edit it. Any fix for this UX issue ??