Hidden nested instances are not receiving updates

The only way I’ve found to solve this is by publishing everything, and I mean EVERYTHING in the library, both nested instances and parent components alike… But again, this solution isn’t the best since it saturates the Assets library and confuses users about which components are allowed and not allowed to use…

Hi @Fede_HP - I went and consulted our support team for context on this, and received the following info:

In the case you have a nested instance of a hidden component in your main component, the changes you make locally to the hidden component would show in the main component, but you wouldn’t be able to publish those changes and accept them in subscribed files unless you unhide the hidden component.

Hiding components hides them from being published, and the changes made to the hidden component will not have been pushed/received in the subscribed file.

The imported component (stored in the subscribed file), which is referenced to create instances of that component in the subscribed file, and referenced by any components that have a nested instance of the hidden component, would therefore still show the old appearance/structure.

So this is an expected behavior – understand that this may all be confusing. Feel free to drop additional questions here or reach out to support direcly by emailing support@figma.com.

I face a similar issue as Fade_HP as in the nested components not being updated. If I understand the reply from the support time correctly when we create an instance of a library component with nested sub-components in a file Figma creates a local snapshot/cashed version of the library component including its nested sub-components.

When then the library component is published and accepted in the file, the local snapshot/cashed component is updated but not the nested sub-components within.

If this is how it works, is there any way to trigger a “full” update of the component including the nested sub-components from the library?

I’m also experiencing the same issue and am pretty reluctant to un-hide the hidden components when the usability of our system relies on the ability to hide nested components within a master component.

I wouldn’t say that this is the expected behavior. There’s no indication that hiding a component will stop any updates from being fed through.

In fact, when you hide a variable for being published, you can’t access it outside of the library file (expected), but if you update the variable (still hidden) and publish the update, the reference will be reflected in other files - so the opposite of the component pattern you’ve described.

As @Simon32 said, it’d be great if there was a way to do a deep update that include hidden nested components. It seems like this might be an oversight, rather than necessarily the intended behavior.

I am experiencing this issue and it is a problem. In my use case, and I assume for many others, I hide components within a library so that on their own they are not available for use to prevent unnecessary clutter.

However, if I update a hidden component that is used within a public component in the same library and it does not update, that is not an accurate reflection of the parent component.

Yes, this was what I tried to achieve as well. I hope there will be some kind of solution to this in the future because it’s quite annoying.

This happened to me when I moved master components in a design file to a new master component library. The hidden subcomponents were still connected to the previous master component location and weren’t updating even though the master in the new library was updating (within the library itself). I had to unhide all of the nested subcomponents one by one so I could publish them. It seems to be resolved now? It’s also possible just the 24 hour delay (me checking again this morning) resolved the issue. But a delay like that is problematic when you are prototyping/designing under a deadline.

I believe I saw something in a help file about making sure you don’t have any hidden components before moving the location of a master components to a new file, but this defeats the purpose of having hidden components and not wanting them to show up in asset libraries. You should be able to keep components hidden but still have them be transferrable to a new library with any updates being reflected in any instances within client design files. 

I’m experiencing the exact same issue with hidden nested instances not receiving updates. It seems that at some point, the synchronization of these hidden instances worked correctly. This functionality is essential for creating well-structured components and ensuring easy maintenance while keeping work files clean for other teams. The current behavior makes managing these components much more tedious, which is quite frustrating for us today…

It would be great if Figma’s development team could consider a fix or an improvement for this. In the meantime, we are forced to either rethink the structuring of our components or publish all instances to avoid synchronization issues.

Please, Figma, when implementing new features, make sure to follow through completely and, above all, avoid regressions on such crucial aspects! Many teams build their design methodologies around specific features, and discovering after an update that they no longer work or have been modified can be extremely frustrating and disruptive. Better stability and consistency in feature evolution would be greatly appreciated!

Commenting to keep the topic alive, I’m running into the same thing. I suggest the Figma Team look into the difference between ‘hide from publishing’ and ‘hide from assets panel’. I feel like the difference is subtle, but it’s there, as we can see from this thread. We want to USE these hidden components, we just dont want people to SEARCH for them.