It’s quite easy to find advice on Directives Talking to Controllers (tell the directive what function to call) and Directive to Directive Communication (one requires a controller defined in the other)*. Controller to Controller communication is usually via Services. Many directives expose state via the scope to elements defined further down the tree (e.g. ng-repeat). But I’ve yet to see any advice on exposing state from a directive to the rest of the world.

The approach I took in angular-virtual-scroll was to use the ng-model attribute (if present) to point to a model that will hold all important state variables. See here if you’re interested. I made the dangerous assumption that nobody would try to alter the state - surely they wouldn’t.

* Pretty much everything at http://www.egghead.io/ is golden.