Scene Archive

A scene archive is a self-contained ZIP file that bundles a CE.SDK scene together with every asset it references: images, fonts, videos, audio, and any other binary content embedded in the design. Where a scene file stores only URLs pointing at externally hosted assets, an archive includes the actual asset bytes inside the file.

This is the format to use whenever the design needs to be portable, offline, or independent of any external asset hosting.

The archive is the right answer when the scene needs to render correctly without depending on any external URL remaining accessible. Common patterns:

• Handoffs outside the originating system. Sending a design or template to a print vendor, a partner platform, or a client. The recipient gets everything required to open and render it, with no broken-link risk.
• Client-side export and sharing. When a user exports a saved design from a web app to their local machine, the archive is a complete, portable file. It does not depend on the platform’s asset hosting remaining accessible in the future.
• Archival and compliance storage. Workflows requiring long-term storage of a design in its exact rendered state benefit from archives, because the asset content is preserved alongside the structure.
• Offline and air-gapped environments. Server pipelines or kiosk deployments without reliable internet can load scenes from archives without any outbound asset fetching.

Both formats serialize the complete scene structure. The difference is where the assets live.

Scene archive. Bundles scene structure plus all asset data into a ZIP. Heavier to store and transfer, but fully portable. The scene works wherever the ZIP file goes.

Scene file. Compact Base64 string with references to externally hosted assets. Lighter, database-friendly, but depends on asset URLs staying live.

Production integrations usually default to scene files (compact and fast) and reach for archives at handoff time: when the design is leaving the system that owns it.

An archive includes the assets that were accessible at the moment it was saved. Assets behind authentication or network restrictions that were unreachable during the save operation will not end up in the file.

When a scene loaded from an archive is later saved back to a scene file (string format), the assets that lived in memory as in-archive buffers should first be uploaded to accessible URLs. Otherwise the resulting string contains buffer-scheme URIs that cannot be resolved in other editor instances.

See scene-file for the lightweight URL-referenced alternative, and scene for the scene container itself.