Conditional Sub Collections ?

[The SPY]

Not sure if I've got the right approach, So thought I'd ask the question before doing anymore work.

I have created my collections so far like this.

First level menu menu has the following:
Arcade
Consoles
Computers
Handhelds

I have only setup Arcade so far and inside Arcade I have another set of menu's as follows:
All
Manufactures 
Decades
Genre

Then if I open "all" it lists all available roms, but any of the options create another Menu list IE Genre then has a list of Genres
Sports
Fighting
Shooting
Etc. (I currently have setup 26 of these)
and in Each Genre I have a .sub file referencing the "All Arcade" rom set and this all works very nicely and creates the break down I like.
But I end up with a huge amount of folders inside Collections and they are all flat.
So what I'm wanting to know a few  things
1. Is this the correct approach  ?
2. Do I have to create a folder inside Collections for every ".sub" file I create ?
3. If I want to repeat this same menu approach for my consoles will I have to create an a folder for each genre for each console, at the moment if just create another .sub file, It makes a merged collection. But is it possible to in the layout file to have a variable or parameter etc that knows that I have  come from Atari 2600 menu and just use just the atart2600.sub rather than all the subfiles within the genre collection folder ?

[Pieter Hulshoff]

This is indeed the correct approach. RetroFE has a very flexible way of handling collections, but it does require those collections to be in separate directories in the collections directory. Changing that structure could come at the cost of its current flexibility, so I'd really need to take a very hard look before making any chances in that area to be honest. The collections have no knowledge of what other collections are out there, nor how the layout is going to display them on screen.

[oracledude]

The way I handle nested collections is with compound folder names.

For example - Sports Games.  I have the following directory structure:  Collection_Sports, Collection_Sports_Hockey, Collection_Sports_Baseball, Collection_Sports_Soccer, etc.  In Collection_Sports, my menu.txt lists all the folders named Collection_Sports_*.  within each of those, I either continue nesting, or create .sub files pointing to MAME, NES, Genesis, etc.