Instance overrides are not preserved when switching variants

[Christoph_M]

Dear community,

me and my team try to figure out a severe issue (affects most of our components) and we could not solve it with the support, so we try to contact you guys in search for help:

Since some weeks, the instance overrides are not preserved anymore when switching variants. To give you an example: we have an icon library, and the icons are represented via an icon component in our main component library. If you place a button with an icon left, and change to the variant with an icon right, any custom icon was preserved when switching variants up to now. We have a huge component library - stable for over half a year, consumed by 100 people, so we think this might be a Figma bug, but we are not 100% sure.

How to reproduce the issue:

1. Create at least two icon components, e.g. “Search” and “User”)
2. Create a new instance from one of the icon symbols, e.g “Search” and make a component out of it: name it “Icon Functional”, name the contained instance “Icon”
3. Create a new instance from the “Icon Functional” component and make a new component out of it: name it “Button”. Create a variant out of it, so we have at least two different buttons. Naming doesn’t matter here.
4. Create an instance of the “Button” and swap the nested “Icon” instance of “Icon Functional” to “User”.
5. Now choose the other variant. The icon “User” is preserved, which is the expected behaviour.

Should look like this:

Now we do the steps that produce the error:

1. Delete the instance of the button you created (the one with the user icon)
2. Go to the “Button” variant set and swap the nested “Icon” instance of “Icon Functional” to “User”
3. Create an instance of the “Button” and swap the nested “Icon” instance of “Icon Functional” to “Search”
4. Now choose the other variant. The icon “Search” is not preserved (you see it becomes the user icon in my screenshot), which worked before. All layers names and hierarchy and instances are the same, so this should work.

Should look like this:

Did anyone experience the same issue? Is this a known bug? Does anyone know a solution?

(If this reads to complicated, I did another – visual – problem description here)

Thanks,

Chris

[Leo_Ehrlich]

I’m having the same problem

[Christoph_M]

I had a deep-dive with the support team, they released an update last night that fixed this issue. It was a bug indeed. Is your problem solved too now (might require a reload of the figma file)?