FlexDash doesn't really has the notion of sending data to a widget/component 
. It uses reflection. You insert data into a data structure (a tree) on the Node-RED side. That is reflected to a tree in the front-end. A widget is then configured to look at specific nodes in that tree to get its values. The configuration itself is also in that tree.
You may recall that we had a long discussion about different models about a year ago 
and I'm always happy to continue that discussion and also to change FlexDash. So far the reflection model has worked well and I believe it solves some of the persistence/initialization/caching issues that Bart mentioned in the first post in this thread.
