Design and implement "standard" method for associating context with actions

For a long time I have struggled with how to associate context with actions, particularly if an action can be invoked in several ways (such as from a toolbar button, menu item, popup menu, link button, etc.). And in the case of popup menus from a tree view, for instance, a standard menu action (such as "Refresh") definitely would need "context" or a way to associate which tree node it was invoked from (e.g.) with the Action. In our application I have invented a somewhat cumbersome approach that is fragile and hard to maintain. There should be a better way.

This issue is created as a placeholder for this research/thinking as well as the implementation (should we come up with one).

I know of other users of Apache Pivot that have also struggled with this concept.