How about a situation where you have users, images and thumbnails. So you might have a structure like...
USERS/22/
where 22 is the user's id. Inside this folder you might have an IMAGES folder and a THUMBNAILS folder as well as a whole lot of other relatively static user info DOCUMENTS VIDEO, whatever. It seems to make more sense to organize these by USER.
Later, I might want to use a filter to block some access while allowing thumbnail access, so I would try a USERS/*/THUMBNAILS url-pattern to allow this folder for all users. Of course
Tomcat doesn't allow this.
Do we really have to arrange our data
USERS/THUMBNAILS/*
USERS/IMAGES/*
etc...
to get this to work?
If so, then one user's data is 'scattered' across a whole lot of directories, instead of being gathered under the roof of their user number.
Is there another way to do it than employ this counter-intuitive directory structure?