When Tridion introduced compound templating (or modular templating if you prefer) in R5.3, one of the things that gradually became apparent was that in the new approach, the relationship between page renders and component renders was rather different. In VbScript, we'd been used to having a fairly simple way to pass parameters between the two. You could read and write parameters from and to a kind of global scope. This meant you could have your component templates influence the way the page templates worked, or have one component template influence the outcome of other component templates that were invoked further down the page. In modular templating, all this was over. You had a Context Variables dictionary available to you in both kinds of render, but the Context Variables dictionary you got in the component context was a new dictionary populated with the values from the original Context Variables of the page.

Of course, most of the time, this model works great. If you have a need to go beyond its limits, the first thing you should do is have a good look at your design and evaluate whether what you're trying to do is really smart. But still - there are rare cases where it can be really useful to pass state back up from the component to the page, make it available to other component renders, etc. Well the good news is, it is possible - you just have to add one more layer of redirection. I've been telling people for ages that I thought this would be possible; I'd just never got round to proving it in code. Well now I have, and I've written up how to implement this pattern over at Tridion Practice. I hope most of you will never need to do it, because it adds another level of complexity, and mostly there's a better way. Anyway - either I hope some small number of you will find it useful, or perhaps I'm just trying to establish prior art in case Apple decide to patent it.