Passing Thing Data Into and Out of Plugins

I must be missing a critical part of my understanding. I have some things, each line of which is the config for an instance of my plugin. I can pass that data into the plugin via the plugins container data source setup like this: “Search for Pic_Datas:item #3” (or 2 or 10 or whichever line it needs to be). Inside the plugin I just read property.whatever. Works fine. But I can’t pass data back. Writing property.whatever = something doesn’t do anything. Is data flow one way or am I trying to do it the wrong way.

BTW, I tried triggering events to pass data back but I can’t see how to pass a value or target a specific thing item. But that was a desperate effort anyway, seems like it should be possible to simply pass data back in the property.

OK, so I got this working with events but I still think it should be possible, and would be simpler, if the parameter sent the change back to the thing.