Icon names and lookup

TL;DR

1. How a name resolves

An icon reference is a set, a colon, and a name. The set says where the artwork comes from, and the name says which one. The provider sets hold the products of one cloud each.

The names come from the product's own name, so they are stable.

A general icon is often guessed by an everyday word instead of its Lucide name. A hundred such words are aliases of a bundled icon: the diagram draws the icon, and validation returns note I122 in notices, which is information and never an error. Write the real name to clear it. A name that is neither bundled nor an alias is still error E122.

search_icons and map_icons find each icon by the same words, so a search for cart or bank returns the icon first.

2. How search finds a product

search_icons understands how people name products. Relevance, best first:

A phrase for a kind of service wins over a product that happens to be named that, so load balancer lists every provider's load balancer, most used provider first. Some examples of what comes back:

3. Map the product names of a request

A request such as "a web app with a Postgres database, a queue for slow work, and a CDN, on AWS" names several products. Map them all at once.

1. List the names. Take each service as the request writes it: Postgres, queue, CDN, web app. Do not translate them first.
2. Call map_icons. Send the names and set provider to the cloud the architecture runs on, so that a generic name such as queue finds that cloud's product (aws:sqs) first.
3. Read the confidence of each result. Write the icon of a result whose resolved is true. For ambiguous, choose from candidates, or ask the user, because a kind of service several clouds offer, or a match by idea only, is not a decision for the tool.
4. Handle the gaps. A name in gaps matched nothing. Use the fallback, or leave icon= off so the node type draws its own, and put the name in the label.
5. Validate. Call validate_diagram or draw_diagram. A node whose label names a product but has no icon gets warning W204 with the exact text to add.

For one name, search_icons returns the matches best first, and the first is the answer. map_icons replaces up to 40 of those calls.

4. Read an icon page

Each icon page lists every icon of a set, grouped by the provider's own categories, with the same layout throughout.

The pictures are extra: a table row holds everything an agent needs, and the picture lets a person see the icon before using it.

5. What an icon draws

Every cloud product draws one of three things, and the name, the search, and the validation are the same whichever it is, so a diagram means the same thing everywhere.

See Trademarks and icons for the terms the artwork is used under.

See also