Save XD projects to plain text format for version control systems.
Use Case
Gilroy manages a team of developers making mobile applications for their clients. Recently the team switched to git for version control.
In a recent check of the back up he noticed that the mockups in XD are binary and each new addition adds up to the size of the backup. He also noticed that when the client wanted to restore a previous version the changes did not have comparisons between commits.
I don’t think that possible (or that the changes needed to make this possible are desirable). Since .xd files also store the graphics involved (as well as a thumbnail, a preview and some more stuff – you can see it when you unzip a .xd file (their really just ZIPs with a bunch of stuff, including JSON files its interactions etc.), this would mean that you suddenly have to manage external images used in the file etc., making it much more complicated to work with XD files.
While I agree that integration with VCS systems would be extremely useful, I think the price for allowing this by changing to a text-based file format is simply to high.
Last but not least, this is more of a request about XD itself (and not plugin development), meaning it belongs more onto UserVoice than here…
It is possible and it’s not complicated. It’s already being done.
Many partners have asked for a way to implement some kind of version control. This would require reading the file format. However, at this stage of development for XD, the file format changes constantly, making it hard to document and expose it to our developers. Because of this, I’d recommend against implementing version control at this moment. Once we stabilize the file format, we will post here!
at this time there is no internal api we have to decompress the file with some node js or some native app and compare changes with old files to have a versioning system is a hacky way for now