2.12 File Path

The file path data type describes where an digital file is located in a machine-readable way. Syntactically, the payload is a URI reference as defined by RFC 3986, or a valid URL string as defined by the WHATWG URL specification. That is, it can be an absolute or relative URL, optionally with a fragment string.

Version 7.0 only supports the following URLs:

• A URL with scheme ftp, http, or https refers to a web-accessible file.

• A URL with scheme file refers to either a local file or a non-local file, as defined by RFC 8089. Local file URLs must not be used in FamilySearch GEDZIP and should be avoided in datasets that are expected to be shared on the web or with unknown parties, but may be appropriate for close collaboration between parties with known similar file structures.

• A URI reference with all of the following:

  • no scheme
  • not beginning with / (U+002F)
  • not containing any path segments equal to .. (U+002E U+002E)
  • not containing a reverse solidus character (U+005C \) or banned character, either directly or in escaped form
  • no query or fragment

  refers to a local file. If the dataset is part of a GEDZIP file, the URL of the local file is a zip archive filename; otherwise, the URL of a local file is resolved with base equal to the directory containing the dataset.

  It is recommended that local files use the directory prefix media/, but doing so is not required.

  For compatibility with GEDZIP and related formats, it is recommended that the following file paths not be used:

  • gedcom.ged
  • MANIFEST.MF
  • any URL beginning META-INF/

Additional URLs may be supported in future versions of this specification.

The URI for the FilePath data type is g7:type-FilePath.