Merge directory listing for 2 different folders nginx

Question

I have 2 folders like folder-a and folder-b and they are shown as part of the Nginx file explorer. I have my Nginx file below. I have a problem statement like folder-a and folder-b sometimes share common sub-directory with different content like

folder-a->sub-folder->1.txt
folder-b->sub-folder->2.txt

so when the user is viewing folder folder-a->sub-folder or folder-b>sub-folder he should be able to see both 1.txt and 2.txt i.e. it should feel like a unified view. Can I achieve this is nginx?

worker_processes 1;

events { worker_connections 1024; }

http {
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    server {
        server_name localhost;
        listen 80;
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
        
        autoindex on;               
        autoindex_exact_size off;   
        autoindex_localtime on;
        
         location ~ ^/folder-a/(.+)$ {
           error_page 404 @redirect;
        }

        location @redirect {
            return 301 /folder-b/$1;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Not tested but as we can specify the output format of the autoindex there may be solutions / configuration to print create a new directory listing.

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_autoindex_module.html

But it will always "print / show" the current folders content. Given that if you want to combine the filelist of two different folders njs could help here.

Something like a server that is configured with autoindex = on and a useable format like json or xml. njs could query both directories and reconstruct a new output (xml, json).

Not tested just a fancy idea.