Is it possible to see previous versions of a document from a published shared link?

Report · May 02, 2023

Hi everybody!

I'm working in a very complex project that had lots of documents. I'm currently liaising with the developers by sharing links to these documents (dev mode). Whenever there's a design change, I try to cimunicate to them, but they fear they are loosing track of changes. I know how to store, view and restore previous versions of a document on my side (from the file and from file info), but I'm not aware of a similar functionality for shared links that have been published and updated many times.

In a nutshell, the developers would like to access the previous states of a shared link just to check what has changed after every design itiration. (https://xd.adobe.com/view/70a3f833-e007. ..).

Is it available somewhare?

If not, are there other suggestion of approaches to mitigate this issue?

Thanks a lot!

Report · May 02, 2023

Hi @designer07e78573369, I'm not sure if it's possible to do some kind of versioning to share in XD but it looks like a third party solution like Zeplin (which also has a plugin for XD) would do the job, demonstration in this video is for Figma but I'm sure it gives you an idea (as it has also been mentioned in the video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzKoawbwEPk Hope this helps!

Report · May 02, 2023

Hi @AkinGn ,

Using Zeplin would mitigate the issue.

Thanks a lot for that!

We'd need to change our workflow and pay for another tool. Hopefully the Adobe team can introduce this feature natively. Seems something basic for complex projects... Let's see...

Report · May 02, 2023

Hi @designer07e78573369, as far as I know, that was the way most of the companies overcome the issue regardless of their design tool (XD, Figma, Sketch etc), either with Zeplin or there was something called "Abstract" for version control in design I guess. Honestly to me Figma looks the closest one to support it natively hope Adobe internalizes the tool as soon as possible and we can see a native solution for that. I'd say for now, none of the design tools I know about supports that natively.

If you prefer not to deal with changing your workflow and use a third part tool (like git, svn etc developers use, still a third party solution even in development right) then as you guess, the only way is doing versioning manually, like "xyz design file-header-updated" etc and putting some notes on the file itself (outside of the artboards of course) and taking a loom video or native OS screencasts etc and managing the links shared manually, like deleting the old ones etc to save space on cloud when necessary. That's always an option too as you know and I know some teams do that. Currently, there aren't any magical ways to do that, other than the methods I summarized. Pls feel free to update us, as I'd like to learn how you handle it.

Report · May 02, 2023

You have a point.

I like your analogy with the development workflow integrating a code editor with a versioning tool.

Still, feels like having this versioning feature for published links would be fairly easy for the adobe team to implement, since versioning already exists on the file side.

I was even considering writing a cron job with Google Apps Script using the API from archive.org to automatically store daily versions of the published links. 😄

Probably not very reliable and practical...

The Zepling Adobe XD plugin has bad ratings. Have you tried https://sympli.io? They also have a adobe XD plugin...

Report · May 02, 2023

I see, honestly it looks like you gave it way more thought than I did, thank you for sharing your past experiences and the methods you thought about. Oh no I never tried Sympli. Zeplin looks more popular so we'll see.. Again feel free to update us as we all would like to learn about your solution.