Rather than arguing about and disagreeing, I'd suggest we write some tests for the use cases and implement it. It sounds like both approaches would work and have different use cases. 1) Being able to attribute a VirtualFile with deployment attributes and have the structure deployer check the attribute(s). 2) Being able define your own structure by predetermined deployment contexts. I still think (2) is simpler. And more generic since it doesn't require the construction of metadata files when you already have the metadata object in memory i.e. constructed on the fly. It is also unclear to me how the attributes in (1) are persisted in general? i.e. going beyond the case where the ide can remember these in some ide config file. Removing the isArchive() from the VFS layer, requires the changes I suggested. However, just ignoring the unrecognised structure means it will not appear in the summary IncompleteDeployments unless that processing is extended to include them somehow? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3975143#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...