Adobe CQ5 component properties for templates - aem

Question

It seems to be quite basic problem, but I still cannot find a nice solution.
I made a component that uses a dialog property.
How could I avoid setting this property for every single page if this component is used also in template?
What I already have tried:
I set name attribute in dialog.xml to absolute path - Component stops working as standalone (dropped into parsys).
Move it to design_dialog.xml - First of all it's conceptually content, so I do not like such move, and again it doeas not make much sense for standalone versions.
Change resource path to absolute, while including in template:
<cq:include path="/content/site/somepage" resourceType="/apps/portal/components/myComponent" />
For the first look it was almost it. Instances included via parsys has it's own path, and Content for template is fetched from single resource... But where to store it, to make template code independent from pages tree structure?
Is there any other nice way to do so? or at least way to improve 3.?

Answer 1

To the original poster, the functionality you are looking for is now supported by Shared Component Properties in ACS AEM Commons (http://adobe-consulting-services.github.io/acs-aem-commons/features/shared-component-properties.html)
Compared to your suggested solutions:
No need for absolute property path required for SCP
Agreed these are "content" properties, so they should be stored as "content" instead of "design". SCP stores these values under the homepage node of a site, making them as genuine of content as any other piece of content.
Agreed that it is bad to have a template hard-coded to a content path of a single site, especially since this makes a multi-site implementation impossible without creating a bunch of templates. SCP does not have this problem, because each site has its own homepage under which the properties are stored.

Answer 2

If I understand correctly, you have a component which may work in two modes:
it may be included statically in the main page renderer via <cq:include>
it may be also dropped into some parsys.
In the first mode component should have some common configuration for all pages and in the second mode it should be configured separately per-instance. The problem is how to create such common configuration.
I think your 3rd solution is perfectly fine assuming that the component configuration is shared by all sites in your CQ instance. At some point it may be too strong assumption, eg. you may have a 3 language branches under /content/site-en, /content/site-fr and /content/site-de and you'd like to make a separate configuration for each branch.
I'd suggest following improvement to the 3rd solution: you may create the shared component under some relative path which will be the same for all pages, like /content/.../configuration/shared-component (where ... may be site1, site2 or site3). Then take first two parts of the current page path, add the /configuration/shared-component suffix and use <cq:include> to include path created in such way.
You may also take a different approach and create a common configuration page referenced by all statically included components. These components may try to find their configuration automatically (via the relative path as above) or they may have a single pathfield that references configuration page.
If you don't like these options (as they assume some site structure or they need some minimal configuration for each component), consider using HierarchyNodeInheritanceValueMap. It allows you to get property from the current resource and if there is no such property, it'll look into the same resource on ancestor pages. Using this you could configure your component just once, in the site root page and inherit configuration across the whole site.