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"Empty" Auto Layout Frame keeps the size of last hidden child

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
May 19, 2022
125 replies
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Hi, I’m not sure if this is new since the May update, but I wonder why “empty” (all elements hidden) Auto Layout Frames keep the size of the last hidden child (and I do not mean last in the list, but the last element to have been toggled out of view by the user), making them not-0px high even with nothing in them.

See here a file with a Frame with three hidden rectangle: the Frame keeps the size of the last child rectangle to have been hidden. When adding a 0-px Frame to the AL frame, and toggling this 0-px Frame off last, the container goes 0-px.

In my opinion, empty AL Frames should have a height of 0. What do you think?

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Pinned Reply By djv

Hey All, thanks for your continued feedback, and we apologize for the confusion caused by this!

As mentioned above, this is behavior is currently a known feature limitation in Figma.
We do not allow Auto layout frames to collapse to 0 when the child layers are hidden, so it is expected that the frame will remain sized as if they were shown.

Again, the team’s original solution was more complicated than they originally anticipated. They will need more bandwidth and more heads to collaborate to get this working as expected.

Our team is still actively tracking this as a feature request and quality improvement for future prioritization. Rest-assured that every new comment is being added to our our open report to give this topic more visibility so that it can be pushed to the top of the team’s priority list.

We’ll be sure to provide an update as soon as we can, but also keep an eye out on our future releases .

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Olha4

+1 ran into the same issue

Klindt_Fabian

In my opinion this feature limitation is a direct contradiction to what Auto Layout is supposed to do? Why would you intentionally add a feature limitation that makes the handover to developers so unneccessarily complicated?

In the Figma Learn article on Auto Layout it says: “Use auto layout to create responsive designs that grow to fill, shrink to fit, and reflow contents” and “Build lists that adapt as items are added, removed, or hidden” but it does not do that due to your feature limitation.

This issue is costing me and my team precious time not only during design, but also when collaborating with developers.

Klindt_Fabian

To everyone else following this topic: our workaround is creating sub-components. Let’s say you are building a card with an optional header, and this header is an Auto Layout containing a couple of different things (like an avatar and a time/date slot, for example, that are shown next to each other). Building the header as a separate sub component allows you to toggle it on/off in the card component. Exposing the sub component in the card component then gives you all the options you need (in this example, hiding either the avatar or the time/date slot independently from each other).

This is not ideal as you, theoretically, can turn on the header boolean and then turn off the two header booleans, which will replicate the bug that is being discussed here - but it does allow you to turn off the entire header.