Attach metadata to icons

[callumbwhyte]

Following a demo of the new <umb-icon> directive by @MMasey (looks awesome!) a discussion started about how we can make the experience of working with icons nicer.

It was discussed that it would be great to attach additional metadata around icons. This could be used to displaying a label alongside the icon, or improving search within the icon picker.

I think it would be cool to define icons as JSON, rather than files. This way we could store additional metadata.

[
    {
        "alias": "cat",
        "path": "umbraco/icons/cat.svg",
        "group": "animals"
    }
]

The alias field is the current name (minus -icon). The path is where the image is located (this could be relative to the /umbraco folder or absolute for packages, as is the case elsewhere in the CMS).

The group field is a proposal for a better way of grouping icons, perhaps to improve the currently overwhelming icon picker with a grouped experience much like the data type picker.

The Umbraco would have a big JSON file defining icons in this way. Following along the lines of #8884 the package.manifest file could also offer a way to define / override custom icons in the same way for package developers.

It's important that any labels or user-facing text can be localised - currently the icon picker search is based on icon CSS class / file names, which are in English and don't accurately represent the icon or are misspelled. The JSON structure doesn't lend itself too well to localisation, but the existing XML dictionary files could handle this by convention:

<area alias="icons">
    <key alias="cat">Cat</key>
</area>

This is just a dump of ideas in the hope we can agree on an approach and split this into some digestible chunks!

[skttl]

Just thinking out loud, how about just adding this meta data as data-attributes in the svg file itself?

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" 
    viewBox="0 0 512 512" 
    data-umb-alias="yen-bag" 
    data-umb-category="money"
    data-umb-keywords="yen money currency china">
    <path
        d="M324.816 172.772l.014.027c-.08-.108-.146-.213-.242-.319a810.557 810.557 0 00-12.461-16.761c-5.395-9.025-8.242-20.006-1.619-35.849v-.009l22.776-54.505-35.808-16.298 3.696-16.156h-89.834l4.708 20.585-36.804 11.869 22.761 54.505.018.009c11.247 26.945-4.856 39.813-14.325 52.928-46.861 64.796-99.313 157.564-99.313 213.49 0 92.734 72.008 89.646 167.857 89.646 95.881 0 167.889 3.088 167.889-89.646 0-55.934-52.467-148.702-99.313-213.516zm-91.138-45.504h45.879v28.931h-45.879v-28.931zm73.431 179.369v20.791h-31.283l-3.282 6.344v10.058h34.565v20.782h-34.565v30.181h-33.245v-30.181h-34.336V343.83h34.336v-10.058l-3.041-6.344h-31.295v-20.791h20.801l-33.489-68.015h35.449l28.859 68.015 28.221-68.015h35.435l-33.915 68.015h20.785z" />
</svg>

[callumbwhyte]

@skttl Quite smart, someone else proposed similar when I discussed this too. There's definitely pro's for having the data stored here, such as more efficient data lookups.

My fear is this data is a little inaccessible to contributors, and a JSON / config would feel more familiar - having everything in one place might make things a bit clearer. Perhaps also a little "mysterious" for package devs adding custom icons, who may not know about needing to add non-standard attributes to the SVG files as text for it to work.

Your proposal of also attaching keywords is interesting, something I also considered in my initial proposal but excluded for one important reason... I'm unsure how best to localize this data. A Danish user in the CMS won't naturally search these terms to find an icon, for example. Having the data in the SVG doesn't help with this, but I'm not sure the current XML dictionary is the best place either... Perhaps something by convention here?

[skttl]

Could the alias be inferred from the filename if not present in an umb-alias attribute? And have a default general category for alle icons without a defined category?

I think having to accompany icons with a json object will make it harder, and more subject to error, than just dumping svg's in a folder. I would also find the json object equally mysterious as the attributes.

[skttl]

For localization we could use the same strategy as in examine.
data-umb-keywords for invariant keywords
data-umb-keywords_da-DK for danish keywords
data-umb-keywords_en-UK for english keywords

[nul800sebastiaan]

I'm also a big fan of putting the data in the actual svg file, we can always document where to change it.
Having to load a json config file and the actual SVG seems a bit more overhead than is needed.

However, we don't want the localization to be inside the file since that is just going to bloat the file and you'll only use 1 localization typically, no need to keep the rest of the strings in memory!

Note: we have the feature at the moment to put a lang folder in the ~App_Plugins/[MyPlugin]/lang folder. Maybe make localization of the icons an optional install? And make it so that people can pick applicable languages to load for icons? I find it a bit difficult to imagine that many people will care too much about searching for winkelwagen instead of cart when picking an icon for their doctype.
This lack of imagination, obviously, is because up until today we've not had the option to even translate these icon names at all 😅

[callumbwhyte]

Agree that localised strings shouldn't be in the file... But not entirely sure about your proposal with the lang folder? I think localisation and even labels would be entirely optional, with fallbacks to the icon alias as currently.

I feel I'm personally in the JSON file camp, just because it feels more logical / familiar and easier to contribute to - surely we're going to have to cast this data into some kind of object in the backend anyway... I'd be keen to see what performance different (if any) there would be with both approaches too!

(No way is "cart" "winkelwagen" in Dutch!?! 😂)

[nathanwoulfe]

Has the reverse been considered - SVG strings in the JSON? Would result in a larger JSON file, but would then be a single request to get all icons.

Could be handled like the language XML and loaded into the browser on startup, as a collection of all discovered icons (ie core ones and any added by packages etc)

[callumbwhyte]

@nathanwoulfe You raise an interesting point about caching / performance...

Currently an SVG can be loaded infinite times during the session by the <umb-icon> directive. Having all of these pre-loaded would at least avoid the backend lookups... I know that @filipbech had some ideas about caching these after first load with service workers...

One hit to the disk and caching everything will certainly be quicker than reading 600 individual files and parsing the data, though the payload will be big and if you only need ~10/600 icons it's rather wasteful... The compromise in my view is storing the paths / data in the browser, much like languages dictionaries - a smaller footprint initially and resulting SVGs could be cached in the browser afterwards.

I think the JSON could get bloated very quickly and overwhelming to contribute to etc if the SVG was in there too, but perhaps an option to add the data inline is good in some cases: We could include an "element" property in the object which falls back to "path" or "url" if missing...

[nathanwoulfe]

That sounds like a sensible middle ground - could pre-prime too with the icons required by the backoffice, to remove that hit.

Would be possible too to return multiple icons in a single request, to speed things up more.

[bjarnef]

I like the feature to reference the SVG to a Group, which is similar to how property editors belong to a group (maybe "common" by default?).

With this the icon picker could have a dropdown to filter icons by group/category.

One thing we also need to consider is a paged result of the icons. At the moment in v8.9.0 if having e.g. 2000+ SVG icons in /Umbraco/assets/icons folder it is causing memory issues in the browser when filtering the results as all icons is rendered in the DOM and the ngRepeat items are filtered. I have submitted a separate feature request for this here: #9352