Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I’ve just been pulling my hair with the same issue on a new project.
It was proving very difficult to get fields and sub fields to match references, as I needed them to, for various template parts.
In my example,the client had a broad colour palette,and pretty much every page component (built using flexible content) could use any colour from the palette.
Rather than manually recreate the colour select field,I thought I’d be a bit more efficient and create a select field in a ‘brand options’ field group,and then clone that field whenever needed. For example:
– Hero banner
– – Title
– – Image
– – Colour (clone field)
And
– Flexible Content
– – CTA Box
– – – Title
– – – Text content
– – – Colour (clone field)
In the hero banner, the data is obtained by get_field,the CTA Box by get_sub_field. The colour field for the subfield was a Lot harder to get to.
I think part of my problem is that I quite like using unique field names, which isn’t necessary for nested content, becausevi findit easier for debugging.