Communication of data on page

[Michael Moore]

I have a page which has a tree and some buttons.  The data for the shape of the tree (and some unique identifiers of tree items) and the list of buttons all come from off-page.

when a button is pressed, sometimes

I need to set up a form which asks for some data and also carries some hidden data.  THe hidden data is the current user, the logged_in_user, and the currently selected tree item.

I instantiate the buttons and send the button instance on to tree creation, but now I have tree data I need to share with on(button)Click: functions.

global variable declarations produce hilarious error messages.  I have not tried a singleton class, because I am really unsure how that would translate.

Any suggestions?

Michael